Iwata: We shouldn’t think entertainment = only video games

Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata has stressed that Nintendo should no longer be thought of as just a video games company.

Reiterating the message sent out to investors in January, the under-fire exec has told Diamond, as reported by CVG, that Nintendo’s expansion into non-gaming markets and its new ‘Quality of Life’ initiative are in fact true with the traditions held by predecessor Hiroshi Yamauchi.

"A lot of people around the world think Nintendo is solely a company that makes video games," Iwata said. And I believe more and more of our own employees have started thinking in this way.

"Yamauchi always said ‘Nintendo is an entertainment company and should never be anything else’, but he didn’t necessarily think ‘entertainment equals video games’. I was wondering how to express Yamauchi’s feelings, and I thought about it non-stop, even during the New Year’s holiday break.

"At the start of this year, I finally figured that the concept of ‘improving people’s quality of life with fun,’ with emphasis on the ‘fun’, would be perfect for Nintendo.

"So even though we won’t change the fact that our focus is on video games, I felt the need to take that occasion to state that Nintendo is a company that can do whatever it wants.

A closer look at Iwata’s detailed and controversial investor briefing issued in January can be seen here.

Will all of this conclude in the reveal of fitness-based non-games hardware at E3? Is this new strategy pointing towards a softening of the company’s support of Wii U? We’ll have a better idea come June.