A portion of an Independent interview with Satoru Iwata...

I: Nintendo, with Super Mario, Zelda, Pikmin, etc. already have many of gaming's greatest franchises but, as you mentioned earlier, third-parties are important to a new console's launch too. Have you been proactive in you approach of such developers?

SI: Yes, we have to; obviously before making the Wii U public we had to proactively go out to those third-party publishers because otherwise we would never have something for the launch of our system.



I think some of these projects have already been announced at E3, but there are other games in the works that haven’t been announced yet and in the autumn, when we announce price point and timing of the launch, we will also be able to announce some more third-party titles.

I: Later this month the 3DS XL handheld launches in Europe. When you were designing the XL were you tempted to put in a second analogue stick as standard?



SIWhen we looked at the design of the 3DS XL we had to look at various factors, one was battery life, one was the overall size of the unit, and we had to make some trade-offs. The choice, if we were going to include the second analogue stick, was to reduce the size of the batters or make the unit much bigger.



What we wanted to do was have a bigger screen in comparison with the overall size of the system, so had various discussions and had to make trade-offs and this is the outcome.



Attaching a second analogue stick is possible but it would have made the system even bigger and, though it perhaps puts a burden on people that really want that second stick, it’s a call we had to make and these people will have to live with it.



This [the lack of a second stick] isn’t my main focus when I look at the 3DS XL, it’s one point we had to cover, but for me personally I’m quite happy with the product we’re able to offer.