Third-parties flocking back to Nintendo
Publisher support for 3DS is "more than we dreamed of"; screen convinced partners of potential, says Fischer
Nintendo has said that one of its major objectives with the release of the 3DS handheld is to gain the support and enthusiasm of third-party publishers and developers.
The firm has been criticised in the past for not offering enough support for third-party game makers on the DS and Wii, while those that did dedicate significant resources to previous Nintendo formats have been burned by a diminishing market.
But Laurent Fischer, MD of marketing in Europe for Nintendo, told GamesIndustry.biz the company has been overwhelmed by interest and support of the new handheld, which wowed industry professionals as E3 last week.
"One of the major objectives of our E3 was to stress that it's important for Nintendo that we get this level of support from partners," said Fisher, in an interview published today. "Of course we're happy about it, but it's more than we would have dreamed of with such support from our partners at this new time for consoles."
"The best way to summarise that is I did a quick check, and it's not an official number, but I gathered information from all publishers and as of now I've seen around 70 different titles announced for the 3DS, including first-party titles of course.
"For hardware that started its public life only days ago that's amazing, and what I was pleased with was you can see very, very strong support from everyone. You can see from the line-up that we have huge titles that no other publisher is doing, without us thinking twice about it. I couldn't see any publisher that isn't very motivated by the console so we're really pleased by that," he added.
Activision, Konami, Ubisoft and Capcom are already pledging some of their biggest franchises to the 3DS with DJ Hero, Metal Gear, Assassin's Creed and Resident Evil, although last week's E3 show mainly consisted of trailers and demos, with Fischer explaining that content partners have only recently been hands-on with the system.
"It's quite recent, in general. As we explained, it's very important to us that we have their support and all the Nintendo teams have been dedicated to our partners and spend the time with them.
"What is important is the surprise effect that the 3D can give on the screen, it was one of the best tools to convince publishers to work as soon as possible with the hardware. They wanted to get hold of it immediately."
The full interview with Laurent Fischer, where he also discusses the use of online in the 3DS strategy, the problems with marketing a new console and more, can be read here.