Nintendo still has faith in "high-street" retailers, despite growth in digital distribution and cloud gaming.
Nintendo president, Satoru Iwata, said that Nintendo wasn't looking to increase its margin by cutting out retailers and distributing its games exclusively over digital.
“I think it’s more that with traditional packaged products we need to produce them, ship them, there’s the stock keeping loss risk, and loss associated with products being sold out or you can have certain items overstocked,” he said.
Mr Iwata believes that digital distribution "will allow [Nintendo] to be more efficient in distributing content".
“I think the games that we make with this improved efficiency we can use to maintain our profitability or, even if software development costs improve for some reason, we balance it out that way; that’s what I’m hoping for from digital distribution,” Iwata continued.
He referred to Apple's method of skipping retail and working digitally, allow it to expand its profit margin. However, Nintendo takes a different road.
“Our way is quite different, we still think retailers are important,” Iwata explained.
Source: The Independent
By Gaetano Prestia - Bio