Iwata On Animal Crossing: New Leaf Reception, Digital Sales And More

President of Nintendo, Satoru Iwata has reacted on the succes of Animal Crossing: New Leaf in Japan. Iwata was apparently quite surprised at the succes of the title in the eShop. He states, surprised, “For a game that costs 4800 yen, to sell 500,000 copies without a discount because it is a download, is quite an event.”

He also reacted on New Leaf’s age range:

“Using our Club Nintendo system we can learn the gender and age of our customers. If we look at the first 3 weeks of Animal Crossing sales to the end of November, the highest group is 19 to 24 year-old women. This is an age-range that is typically found in fewer numbers for Nintendo. I’ve never seen anything like it; a game that sells like this on a Nintendo hardware.”

He was surprised at the amount of hardware sold along with the game, along with the gender of the customers:

“However, something interesting is the gender of 3DS purchasers. If we look at the male-female ratio as a whole, it divides into 69% males, 31% female, but if we limit it to just those customers that purchased the hardware at the same time as Animal Crossing the percentages become 44% male and 56% female. These are the sort of numbers that leave me dumbfounded.”

He commented on the ongoing smartphone vs handheld argument:

“The common argument going on right now is that since smart phones exist, there’s no need for specialised game machines anymore, right? But, these 19 to 24 year old women are the ‘smart phone people’. We often say that casual female users do not need specialised gaming machines, but here we see them reconfirming the value of those systems.”

About Animal Crossing: New Folk’s reception:

“On the (previous generation) Nintendo DS, Animal Crossing received high praise and shocked the world by selling more than 5 million copies [domestically], it become one of the representative games that people would buy for the system. However, the Wii version, it was highly anticipated and we released it into the world but it didn’t go very well, right? That game is, for us, one with many points of reflection.

At that point, the core members of the Animal Crossing team used this reflection as a spring board, saying ‘Let’s make the next game one that our customers can really enjoy’. I would go so far to say that I honestly felt a tenacity from the nuclear members of the development team. This time, there are many features inserted that make you say ‘You can do this thing?’ and ‘It goes that far?’. In addition, to add an example, the ability we added to create furniture with interesting designs and share it through various means, coupled with our customers’ creativity created an amplification of sorts. It was really interesting. What really helped to spread this around was social media, and smart phones. What really sold Animal Crossing to women this time was, without question, smart phones.”

On New Leaf’s ability to take screenshots:

“Because you can take screenshots anywhere during the game, people are uploading the shots to social media and say ‘Hey, look what I did’ and everyone gets excited. For example, there are plenty of people who have tried and enjoyed the game after seeing people they follow on Twitter talk about it fondly, then developing their own interest and trying it out for themselves.”

Iwata also commented on Nintendo Direct, normally including announcements from Nintendo:

“We deliver videos called Nintendo Directs to explain about our strengths via video sites, and the Introduction to Animal Crossing video has received 1.6 million hits on Youtube. What’s more is that over half of those views have taken place from smart devices.

The game became a topic on social networks, then people would say ‘Watch this and you’ll understand’ and people go ‘Well, that’s cool’ and bought it. It’s not a 3 minute music video, and so for a 47 minute video with developers talking casually about a game to have 1.6 million views is almost impossible, like really something unusual, I think.

On the sales succes:

“Not one of the developers was thinking about how many units the game would sell. They were purely focused on creating a game that the users could say ‘Yes, this game satisfied me’ and focused on improving a game series they love. And with that, hundreds of thousands of people have spent over 20,000 yen for a single game and the hardware. That’s not a method or phenomenon that many other game developers get to experience, I imagine.”

Iwata was quite surprised about Animal Crossing: New Leaf’s succes, and how well it does outside of its target demographic, especially in this smartphone overrun world. Nintendo Direct also does surprisingly well. It’s not often you see an online video that’s over 15 minutes in length reach 1 million views.

Are you intent on buying New Leaf? What are you excited about? Tell people in the comments.