Nintendo bullish despite disappointing Cube performance

Speaking in an interview with French newspaper Les Echos, Nintendo communications director Yasuhiro Minagawa has struck out at critics, pointing at the company's strong profits and expressing confidence in the GBA's performance against N-Gage and PSP.

Nintendo has never been a company given to remaining silent in the face of criticism, and although it has been less outspoken since the departure of long-standing boss Hiroshi Yamauchi (noted for his tendancy to go a bit nuts and "tell it like it is" every now and again, in particular in relation to his vitriolic criticisms of Square), the company still shows regular flashes of its old bullishness.

Take Minagawa-san's response to questioning about the poor sales of the GameCube. "Our consoles have never lost money," he pointed out, "unlike the Dreamcast and Genesis which never recorded a profit. People regularly predict our failure in this business, but we're still here meanwhile Bandai, Matsushita, NEC, and Sega have all gone."

You'd never guess from that statement that Nintendo's new best friend is Sega - but the message is clear. Anyone talking about Nintendo "doing a Sega" at any point in this generation or the next generation of home hardware is very mistaken indeed - a fact which should have been self-evident from Nintendo's financial figures, but which the company obviously feels deserves emphasising anyway.

Whatever about past rivals, Minagawa-san is surprisingly dismissive of current rivals as well, and offers some further insight into launch plans for Nintendo's next console, dubbed N5 by commentators. "Xbox has already absorbed substantial loses, and unlike Sony, Microsoft indexes their profits. The GameCube arrived in the American market 18 months after PlayStation 2, next time we'll launch at the same time."

The real threat to Nintendo, some might argue, isn't in the home market at all - but rather in the portable market, where its key moneyspinner, the Game Boy Advance, is about to come under fire from the biggest player in the mobile phone market (Nokia) and the biggest player in the console market (Sony). "They [Sony and Nokia] will launch with nothing and we'll already have 60 million GameBoy Advance players," commented a confident Minagawa when pressed on this aspect of the business. "We don't see the growth of the portable market as a threat, but an opportunity. It's allowed us to cut the price of components and release the GameBoy Advance SP."

So there you have it - far from feeling bruised by the mediocre performance of the Cube and scared of the forthcoming competition to the GBA, Nintendo is talking in terms of profits, next generation systems and new business opportunities. Whether the lessons learned from the Cube are the right ones, and whether they can be successfully applied to the N5, however, remains to be seen.

Polygon