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Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata has talked openly about potentially bringing paid DLC to its titles, using Super Mario 3D Land and Wii Fit Plus as examples. Iwata believes, much like the rest of the games industry has done for years, that games can bring in revenue through add-on content.
“In this fiscal year, we are in the transitional phase of platforms when a new platform has not penetrated well and even the software with the most potential for the platform can only sell as much as the number of hardware systems sold so far,” said Iwata during an investor Q&A last week.
“In other words, however, such software could sell for a long time to come. For instance, we anticipate that Super Mario 3D Land and Mario Kart 7 will bring in a substantial profit in the next fiscal year and the year after that.
“On the other hand, we will be able to do various things in the field of digital business. Up until now, once consumers who had bought a game got tired of it, they would never play it and it would never draw public attention again. Even if the game had the sales potential to other new consumers, they rarely actually bought it because the consumers who already had bought it would never talk about it again and the game would be considered an old one.
“Having said that, what if we could provide add-on content through the network? As I referred to before, for example, this is the idea of supplying new stages to Super Mario users who want to play the game more but have completed the game and lost interest in the existing stages.
“This will not only give us new profits but will lengthen the life of a product, in that it will never be out of fashion and can keep attracting public attention as long as many people play it.”
Iwata also suggested that digital add-on packs could be released for Wii Fit Plus.
“We can recommend that Wii Fit users try new trainings and games, and continue to play the software with a fresh mind, which will give the software a longer life and bring us slightly more revenue.”
While Nintendo has offered DLC for titles in the past, it hasn’t charged for it – something that other publishers have been doing for years.
