The Nintendo blames poor marketing for the lower-than-expected 3DS sales.
The 3DS hasn’t sold as well as Nintendo would like, and Nintendo president Satoru Iwata says that his company will need to educate people on the “value” of glasses-free 3D.
“There is no easy road to making people understand the attraction of glassless 3D images and making Nintendo 3DS widespread,” said Iwata during a recent meeting with investors.
Iwata also believes that fans don’t fully understand everything that the 3DS has to offer, and aren’t even using built-in features like the system’s Augmented Reality games and the Mii Maker.
“It is now clear that the combination of these new features is not necessarily easy-to-understand by just saying one word to those without experience,” he said. “There seems to be more than a few consumers who have Nintendo 3DS hardware but don’t know about this software and possibly haven’t had a chance to get interested in it.
“After all, pre-installing a feature which we would like many people to enjoy is not sufficient to make it actually popular among users.”
For the moment, however, Nintendo is more focused on the eShop than education. The company plans to launch a variety of network services in May and are currently coming up with ways to draw people to the online store. For example, Nintendo will be offering a free version of Excitebike in order to publicize their “3D Classics” line of games.
Source: Nintendo Financial Briefing [via Kotaku]
