Nintendo’s Iwata Discusses 3DS Development Costs, 3D Console Consideration

Following last week’s E3 debut of the 3DS, Nintendo Co. Ltd President Satoru Iwata conducted an Investor Relations Q&A session which brings to light some further thoughts and ideas behind not only the 3DS and development for it, but the prospect of 3D in other Nintendo products as well.

Following are some of the relevant excerpts from the Q&A session:

What do you think the Nintendo 3DS is going to be with respect to software development costs, both from your own first-party perspective, but also from the perspective of third-party developers?

I would like to answer your question from two different perspectives. Given my development background, the first will be from a developer’s perspective, and then I’ll also try to answer the question from the perspective of a representative of the company that is the platform holder. First, I’d like to talk about how much development resources are required in order to take a game and create it in three dimensions.

As long as you are already creating a fully rendered 3D world, all you have to do in order to create the 3D visual effect is to capture the same images with two cameras, one for right eye and the other for left eye. From a development perspective, it actually does not make much of a difference in terms of development costs to create the 3D visual effect.

On the other hand, because the visual capabilities of Nintendo 3DS are more powerful than the existing Nintendo DS, if you are going to take full advantage of the graphics capability of Nintendo 3DS, the development cost is also expected to rise.

Therefore, if developers decide to try and maximize the graphical powers of the system, then the cost would be more expensive than what it is currently for Nintendo DS and may potentially approach the cost of developing Wii software.

Next, I would like to provide my perspective as the president of the company of the platform holder. While I do not think that you simply have to increase the cost of your development in order to create compelling software on Nintendo 3DS, it would also be a lie if I said that any software can be developed without spending a lot of money.

I think it’s ok to see a broad range in development costs from title to title. I believe it’s possible for developers who have great ideas to be able to find ways to develop those ideas at a relatively low cost and make the resulting game a hit due essentially to the quality of the ideas.

On the other hand, I believe there will be developers who will use a similar amount of resources to create games as if developing for a home console, and such games also would result in satisfaction to our consumers.

I see the possibility for a broad range of software development costs to increase the possibility of satisfying Nintendo 3DS owners and really appeal to a very broad audience. That would be the ideal situation for Nintendo 3DS. We intend to exemplify this with our first-party titles.

With 3D getting a lot of attention this year, what are your plans for stereoscopic 3D output from the Wii console? Do you also have such plans to allow 3D output from the Nintendo 3DS to a television set for the 3D photos and video that can be seen in that device?

…unfortunately, considering the current penetration rate of 3D television sets in ordinary households, we don’t think that there’s much reality in creating a new hardware system that would support 3D visuals as a home console.

Of course, at some point in the future, when the installed base for 3D televisions is such that it’s no longer a rarity for people to have one, then certainly, when that point in time comes, whichever console Nintendo would release at that point would most likely take advantage of 3D technology.

On the other hand, the advantage of a handheld device is that the hardware of the handheld device and the screen are a single unit. And what that means is that anybody who purchases that device, or 100% of the installed base of that device, can experience the 3D visuals. This is the reason why Nintendo is first introducing 3D games with a portable game system.

You can find the rest of the Q&A in full (and in English) on Nintendo of Japan’s website.