"Gaming has to be at the heart" of DSi, says Dunaway
Nintendo's exec of sales and marketing says that the DS Lite will continued to be sold alongside the new handheld
The new Nintendo DSi will still be centred around "gaming experiences" despite the addition of multi-media features, according to Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo of America's executive vice president of sales and marketing.
Speaking to Wired, Dunaway talked of the effect of adding a camera and media capabilities to the DS and the possibility that it could dilute the handheld's focus on gaming.
"It's very much centred in gaming experiences and interactive entertainment experiences," she said. "What we like to do is make things fun, and so when you start taking pictures and superimposing people's faces onto someone else's body, and surrounding it with graffiti and sharing it with a friend, it's just fun. I think we'll see people do interesting things with it, incorporating the functionality into games."
"Gaming has to be at the heart of it," she added.
Dunaway went on to explain that Nintendo's current plans were to keep the DS Lite on sale next to the DSi due to its "huge untapped potential".
"Right now we're still working through what the strategy's going to be here," she admitted. "But we think that there's huge untapped potential for the DS Lite. Because when you've got only one in every five households in the U.S., compared to one in every two in Japan, it says there's potential."
"You've seen some of the work we've done this year with celebrities, that we're bringing a lot of new consumers in to the DS. So I think there's opportunity for both of them to coexist for some period of time."