Yoshida says industry ‘needs’ Nintendo, should switch focus from core games market

President of Sony Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida has said that a healthy and successful Nintendo is vital to the overall video games industry.

When you look at the situation around Nintendo that way, do you characterize Nintendo as our competition?” he told IGN, as transcribed by MyNintendoNews.

I think in the bigger scale of things happening in the industry or tech or people’s lives, how they play games on what device, and how they start to learn to play games, I think Nintendo and us are pretty much in the same group

We need Nintendo to be very successful to help induct as many consumers who like to play games with controllers, right? I have two Wii Us. I play Wii U games with my daughters, because they make pretty fun family friendly games.”

However, Yoshida does add that he thinks Nintendo made a mistake in trying to target the Wii u at the core games market – a mistake that, fortunately, in his view it is now beginning to correct.

I think success or making mistakes depends on how you set your goal,” he added. I don’t know what was Nintendo’s goal when they launched Wii U. To me, it was a bit confusing because what they do really well was create some very safe environment for anyone, especially children to enjoy games like induct those people who have never played games ever to become gamers.

And they always do very well.

To me, what they have made with Wii U was continuing what they were doing well. But the messaging when they were saying ‘we are for core gamers’ was a bit confusing. But this year I think they slightly changed their messaging, and it seems to me like they are coming back to where they are focused.”