Iwata: Nintendo Plans to Support Third-Parties More with 3DS
You might have noticed that a lot of third-party titles are lined up for the Nintendo 3DS. Satoru Iwata explained that this is a part of building bridges, so to speak. His exact words are written below.
“We need to decrease the concern that only software from Nintendo can sell well on Nintendo platforms and third parties’ software cannot sell in the same volume,” he said. “For the Japanese launch of Nintendo 3DS, so that we will not make a trend similar to the one found for Wii in Japan now, we feel a need to have closer ties with our third-party developers from the beginning.”
“For Nintendo 3DS, we need to tackle this issue.”
Despite criticism often aimed at Nintendo, criticism stating that while maybe Nintendo's games are good and sell well on their systems, nobody else's does, Iwata claims that the DS has seen better third-party sales than any other console, to be exact, 200 million better. He also said that contrary to what people seem to believe, the success Nintendo see on their own consoles is good for other companies as well, not just themselves.
“Nintendo is trying to expand the installed base of our hardware with our own software so that each platform can have a solid base for third-party software companies to make lucrative businesses,” he said. “We were tackling this mission as our responsibility as the platform holder.”
He went on to mention that Nintendo's position in the Japanese Wii market might be a bit "too extreme", and they plan on working more on fixing that as well. Below, you'll find a list of all Nintendo 3DS games announced to be in development so far. It's quite a mouthful.