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Nintendo has for the first time admitted that it may abandon Satoru Iwata’s Quality of Life roadmap.
Kotaku reports on a Asahi story revealing that Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima has told investors: It’s not yet at the level of a Nintendo product. If we can release it, we’ll release it. If we can’t, then we’ll examine things further.”
Quality of Life was unveiled by late former Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata back in January 2013. At the time it was positioned as one of Nintendo’s main business pillars.
We will attempt to establish a new platform business with which we can leverage our strengths, but which is independent from our video game platform business,” he said at the time.
What Nintendo will try to achieve in the next 10 years is a platform business that improves people’s Quality Of Life in enjoyable ways. While we will continue to devote our energy to dedicated video game platforms, what I see as our first step into a new business area in our endeavor to improve QOL is.
The theme of ‘health’. It has been a long time since people started to say that the console era has now shifted to a new mobile era, with wearable technology in the spotlight at CES this month. Following others into the exceedingly crowded market of mobile applications or the market of wearable technology that is expected to become increasingly competitive and fighting with brute force is not our way of doing business. Yet again, it is our intention to go into a new blue ocean.
With that said, we wish to achieve an integrated hardware-software platform business that, instead of providing mobile or wearable features, will be characterized by a new area of what we like to call non-wearable technology.”
The first QOL product, which was not the ill-fated Vitality Sensor, was announced in October 2014. However, nothing has been heard of the sleep sensor since.
Questions about the future of QOL started to be asked shortly after the passing of Iwata, with reports in August suggesting that internal attitudes towards the project had cooled. This was seemingly denied by Kimishima in December, however.
