Gaming All hail Iwata-san!

[Turkey]

For many years, companies have dissed Nintendo in many ways. As you all know, Nintendo President Yamauchi-san retired and put Iwata-san on his place. However, on a recent press conference, he talked about his view of Final Fantasy XI.
Read and be surprised:

[QUOTE]
Nintendo's new president Satoru Iwata delivered blockbuster news to shareholders today in Japan. Specifically, Nintendo expects sales of their GameCube console to exceed 50 million units by 2005. Speaking about the new projections, Iwata-san said, "Nintendo is the world's largest game developer, and despite the continued pricing battle with Sony's PlayStation 2 and Microsoft's Xbox - we're confident we can meet our sales projections." As of March 2002, Nintendo had sold approximately 3.8 million GameCube consoles worldwide, slightly below initial projections. According to Iwata-san, Nintendo has failed to sell a substantial number of GameCube units due to a lack of quality first party software. To rectify the situation, Iwata-san plans to rollout new chapters in several popular franchises such as Mario, Zelda, Metroid, StarFox, F-Zero, Mario Kart, Kirby and Pokemon for the GameCube over the next two years.

In an uncharacteristically bold move, president Iwata-san also criticized Japanese developer Square for their recently released PlayStation 2 online RPG Final Fantasy XI. During his speech today he said, "While the popularity of online games can't be denied, Final Fantasy XI has been a failure. Square has been unable to attain half the number of users they anticipated (200,000) due to the management of their online servers. Typically, new chapters in the series [Final Fantasy] sell more than 2 million copies. We're paying particular attention to the online environment to ensure the success of future network games such as Phantasy Star Online for GameCube."

Following today's briefing, Square president Youichi Wada rebutted Nintendo's harsh criticism of Final Fantasy XI. When pressed for comment, Wada-san said, "The scale of the online market, its profitability and problems, are much different from conventional videogames. Final Fantasy XI has been an experiment to broaden the market - something we think Nintendo should encourage. Players have been very pleased with Final Fantasy XI, and we hope Nintendo's comments today don't dissuade any future players from experiencing the game themselves."[/QUOTE]

I can only say one thing for Square: BURN!:laugh:

Altough this may be a bad move from an economical point of view, my respect for Iwata has raise by 10 points.