Amongst all the debacle of the used game market impacting publisher profits and allowing for thriving retailers, Nintendo has entered the fray with comments from Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime who simply chips in that if developers should make games consumers want to hold on to rather sell on. He provides some choice words of plausibility although does recognize there’s a bigger picture in the used sales market.
“We have been very clear, we understand that used games are a way for some consumers to monetize their games,” Fils-Aime said. “They will buy a game, play it, bring it back to their retailer to get credit for their next purchase. Certainly, that impacts games that are annualized and candidly also impacts games that are maybe undifferentiated much more than [it] impacts Nintendo content. Why is that? Because the replayability of our content is super strong. The consumer wants to keep playing Mario Kart. The consumer want to keep playing New Super Mario Bros. They want to keep playing Pikmin. So we see that the trade-in frequency on Nintendo content is much less than the industry average – much, much less. So for us, we have been able to step back and say that we are not taking any technological means to impact trade-in and we are confident that if we build great content, then the consumer will not want to trade in our games.”