Iwata: Nintendo Deliberately Restrained at E3

Newsweek's game guy N'Gai Croal published a fairly candid interview today with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. Croal's questions elicited some pretty interesting responses from Nintendo's lead man, including the fact that Nintendo has several new projects in development that it purposefully didn't announce at the trade show. "However, we are definitely working on new franchises and we just didn't choose to talk about them yesterday," Iwata told Croal. "Now, if we didn't feel that we had gained a lot of popular momentum and with success that it's shown so far, we might have tried to get out a little more information and do an upcoming products, again, just to build some excitement, but since we do have that momentum right now, we chose not to do so." The interview touched on Nintendo's pretty strong first party market share, which Iwata said will soon be lessened. "Next year, we're going to see a larger number of third party software. And I guess the impression of Nintendo is too powerful or too dominant will dissipate with again the increase in third party software," Iwata said in the interview. The president also spoke on the developer's conference Nintendo held earlier in the summer, saying he convinced the traditionally secretive, unhelpful game giant to throw third parties some support. "I mean, up to that point, Nintendo had a reputation of being very, very closed mouthed and close-fisted with that sort of information: develop it on our own, keep it to ourselves, and not being very friendly to outside developers," Iwata told Croal. Iwata had some flattering words to say about EA CEO John Riccitiello, who earlier this year called for more innovation in the game industry. "I want to say also that when I read [Electronic Arts CEO John] Riccitiello's comments on the state of games, I was a bit surprised. I said, 'Boy, that doesn't sound like an EA person speaking. That sounds like someone from Nintendo talking,'" the president said in the interview.