Iwata:

A variety of media have written that Nintendo is cornered a number of times, but I do not think we were cornered at all. Needless to say, we are also aware that unless a company can deal with the rapidly changing world, it will face decline. But I would like to emphasize here that our alliance is not the result of a lack of better options for a cornered company.

When I first met with Mr. Moriyasu, I started to wonder if there was anything we could work on together. After that, the more we discussed, the more I realized that DeNA knew so many things that Nintendo did not. Mr. Moriyasu even said that DeNA did not mind remaining in the background as long as it could collaborate with Nintendo, and I came to realize that this could be a very productive opportunity as in comparison to what Nintendo might have been able to achieve by itself. We would be able to provide consumers with far more attractive offers in terms of entertainment experiences and speed.

This is why I just said that this is not a decision made out of a lack of options. In fact, Nintendo has received a number of proposals from a variety of companies. Among them, Nintendo has proactively chosen DeNA, and today, we are able to make this announcement. Mr. Moriyasu?

Moriyasu:

From DeNA’s point of view, the app game market for smart devices including smartphones is precisely what we have been focusing on. We recently created a hit game app, and we have a very good sense that we will be successful in this area. We evaluated what options are out there in order to expand our business and presence even further, and we thought the best one is to form a partnership with Nintendo. Nintendo has extremely powerful IP, and leveraging this IP will be very effective to grow our business even more. It makes a lot of sense to us, and we are ecstatic that we are able to form this alliance.

In the second part of your question, you asked what we plan to do with our original IP in addition to the new collaborative IP titles. Throughout DeNA’s history, we have always worked with many different companies to develop games that use their IP. Strong IP is very effective in drawing users’ attention. So, yes, we will continue to co-develop titles based on various kinds of IP.

At the same time, we also have a strong desire to create our own, original IP. And we will work on that in parallel. We will actually be making much more than one or two titles per year. Among the multiple titles we are going to develop, some of them will be our own IP titles that we develop completely on our own, and some will be collaborative.

Iwata:

We have just announced this alliance, so we would not consider jointly releasing the first Nintendo smart device game with any other company. Of course, we have created this alliance with the belief that it will go well. On the other hand, nobody can guarantee that any collaboration like this will result in a win-win situation for both companies. So, we naturally cannot say we will continue doing business this way forever. But first and foremost, we will focus on our alliance to jointly develop and operate game applications for smart devices.

As for your question about the business model, in general, the free-to-start style of business model, where players can play for free initially but are required to pay money in order to advance further, is more widely adopted for games on smart devices while, for dedicated video game systems, we principally sell packaged game software as a finished product. Looking at these differences, only when we can encourage a great number of smart device users to accept our offers and play with our game applications can we say that expanding our businesses on smart devices makes sense to Nintendo.

So, while we want to consider how to encourage as many people as possible to accept our offerings, Nintendo, on the other hand, is a bit of a contrarian. More specifically, while others may be tempted to follow in the footsteps of other successful companies, we are not interested at all. We will take a variety of approaches by repeatedly discussing with Mr. Moriyasu such things as where there is room for improvement and whether we can create a brand-new business model. I thought it would be premature for me to share my aspirations, so I did not include them in my presentation, but it would be great if the two companies could jointly invent a brand-new business model.

Iwata:

When we say "global market," it naturally includes Japan. I used "global" in its literal meaning of a global market. There is significance in the fact that any place where consumers with smart devices exist can be a market for our game applications since we are able to deliver our software by taking advantage of smart devices’ digital distribution functionality. So, we aim to target the global market.

On the other hand, when any company does things simultaneously, there are always human resource and time constraints. We are yet to come to the stage where we can analyze whether or not a simultaneous global launch will actually be feasible. We must first review and decide what kind of deployment we should make in which area. We will make more announcements in the future as we conclude these reviews.

Today, this is an opportunity for both companies to announce that we have formed this sort of alliance and that we have made our first step together. Please wait for our future announcements for such details as which Nintendo IP will be used, which country will be first, in which order global deployment shall take place and which party will be featured as the game publisher or the service provider. We will make some announcements when we are ready to do so later this year.