Iwata on expanding the longevity of software through digital content
...For instance, we anticipate that “Super Mario 3D Land” and “Mario Kart 7” will bring in a substantial profit in the next fiscal year and the year after that. On the other hand, we will be able to do various things in the field of digital business. Up until now, once consumers who had bought a game got tired of it, they would never play it and it would never draw public attention again. Even if the game had the sales potential to other new consumers, they rarely actually bought it because the consumers who already had bought it would never talk about it again and the game would be considered an old one. Having said that, what if we could provide add-on content through the network? As I referred to before, for example, this is the idea of supplying new stages to Super Mario users who want to play the game more but have completed the game and lost interest in the existing stages. This will not only give us new profits but will lengthen the life of a product, in that it will never be out of fashion and can keep attracting public attention as long as many people play it. We should not aim to just increase the ARPU, but at the same time, to give our products a longer lifespan and a larger number of total sales. “Wii Fit Plus,” which we released as packaged software as the upgraded version of “Wii Fit,” could be another example. Under the current network environment, we might be able to provide such upgrades to consumers through the network as opposed to just providing the content in a disc form. We can recommend that “Wii Fit” users try new trainings and games, and continue to play the software with a fresh mind, which will give the software a longer life and bring us slightly more revenue. - Satoru Iwata
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