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Nintendo Businesses Entertainment Games

Nintendo's Perrin Kaplan Takes A Bow 42

Posted by Zonk from the hard-to-disguise-pure-class dept.
The MTV Multiplayer blog is playing host to a two-part interview with outgoing Nintendo president of marketing Perrin Kaplan. A well-respected figure in the games business, Kaplan's 'exit interview' with Stephen Totilo touches on everything from the missing September surprise to why the US doesn't have a fan club. "You know we've taken a really close look at what they're doing in Europe and what they're doing in Japan. You have to remember that, geographically, we're much bigger here and cost-wise, it is much more expensive to run a program like that. We try to do pre-sale with our retailers as often as possible. You're talking about a scale that is much larger. But we do look at the differences in markets and what consumers are liking. It's just a difference in scale." Good luck to Ms. Kaplan in her future endeavors.
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Nintendo's Perrin Kaplan Takes A Bow More

Nintendo's Perrin Kaplan Takes A Bow

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  • So this is Kaplan's last post then?
  • This is the person who was a marketing droid that clearly had no idea what they were talking about when they referenced the games, right?

    Oh, so sad. So long marketing tool. *yawn*

  • Tough Love. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 222 ( 551054 ) <stormseeker@gm[ ].com ['ail' in gap]> on Thursday October 25, 2007 @11:14PM (#21124303) Homepage
    I love Nintendo. I honestly do. I own multiple pairs of boxer shorts featuring Mario. I own both a DS and a Wii, with at least 10 titles for both.

    You could get away with calling me a fanboy.

    It is because of this that with great sadness that I make the following complaint. Why is Nintendo so hesitant to acknowledge, let alone correct glaring mistakes?

    Friendcodes are stupid. A solid online experience isn't *that* hard, especially when you have solid examples to reference.

    Admit that there is a storage problem with the Wii, and for the love of god at least say that a USB hard drive is in development. Tell us that games will be playable directly from SD.

    This isn't rocket science, and it's not a recent issue.

    Anyone else remember the great Mortal Kombat debacle? You know, the whole attitude that violent games don't belong on Nintendo systems? That really didn't work out so well for them, and so they've changed policy. It took years, but it happened.

    This isn't "end of the world" stuff, but seriously. It's not that hard, and when your systems are practically printing money, you would think issues like this would get resolved. And ignorance isn't an issue; just as in this interview, and countless others, these issues are raised time and time again.

    Hell, if they tossed an intern on customer satisfaction duty and had him read stories and comments on Joystiq, Slashdot, Kotaku, and Destructoid all day, it would do wonders for customer satisfaction, if only that feedback could somehow factor into decision making.

    I still love you, Nintendo. We just need to have a talk.

    • ...when your systems are practically printing money...
      I don't see why Nintendo needs to improve anything if the current offering is already "printing money."

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dj_tla ( 1048764 )

        I don't see why Nintendo needs to improve anything if the current offering is already "printing money."

        So that it continues printing money in the future. This is why you don't see a lot of lottery winners in lists of 'top x richest people:' they get a windfall of money and instead of using it to make even more money in the future, they just spend it.
    • Friendcodes are stupid. A solid online experience isn't *that* hard, especially when you have solid examples to reference.

      Yeah, no kidding. Especially when it's being done ON YOUR SYSTEM as EA is doing by hosting online play through their own servers and bypassing the friend codes all together.

      It's not that hard, and when your systems are practically printing money, you would think issues like this would get resolved.

      I would actually think that they'd keep doing what they're doing in that situation. It's

      • Friendcodes are stupid. A solid online experience isn't *that* hard, especially when you have solid examples to reference.

        Yeah, no kidding. Especially when it's being done ON YOUR SYSTEM as EA is doing by hosting online play through their own servers and bypassing the friend codes all together.

        How many of these games using EA online matchmaking are rated E? And how many will stop working online after two years after EA pulls the plug on an older title in order to push sales of the sequel?

    • Re:Tough Love. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @12:50AM (#21125087)
      Friend codes may suck if you are an adult gamer or a shashdotter. But if you are a parent concerned about your kid playing online (and talking to) people they dont know (who may be bad guys impersonating kids) they are a good thing.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by gonzoxl5 ( 88685 )
          a lot of parents aren't technology literate enough to understand/implement controls if they are optional.

          More companies should be like Nintendo and take a responsible line towards online participation.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by AvitarX ( 172628 )
            How about default the friends codes to ON and not OFF. The parent must turn it off. Any kid who knows about and can turn it off (most probably) can already use the unternet and trade the codes anyway. But the clueless ones with clueless parents are fine.
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • You own 10 titles for the Wii? I pity you, as at least 5 of those must be shovelware.

    • Friendcodes are stupid. A solid online experience isn't *that* hard, especially when you have solid examples to reference.

      Given that they're making chattable games available to pre-teens, and parents of said pre-teens NEVER look over the shoulder when a kid's playing a "gameboy," I can see why they made the Friend Code system the way they did. You can only play with people you know.

      However, the Wii looks like it'll be a bitch. It's not even one Friend Code per Wii or per Mii. It's apparently going to be a Friend Code per player per GAME. This is clearly nonsensical if it's true.

      Two suggestions to Nintendo to salvage

      • DS games already have the local friends code passing. For example, let's say you play a local game of Mario Kart with your friend from next door, you'll get his friend code and he yours from just doing that.

    • Admit that there is a storage problem with the Wii, and for the love of god at least say that a USB hard drive is in development. Tell us that games will be playable directly from SD.

      Cue one of several thousand who didn't buy any Virtual Console games: they won't see this storage problem. Still, nice as the Wii is for the casual market, it would be great if they made a system that can be more easily expanded and customized for those of us who like to play games more often. I don't know how product creati

    • Friendcodes are stupid.

      Almost every game (except co-op-only games such as Animal Crossing: Wild World) can do random matchmaking in addition to the friend code system. In other games, you need friend codes only to 1. choose friends to play with, or 2. do text and voice chat. Disney's Toontown MMOG has the same restriction on chat, as unpoliced chat allegedly allows malicious players to locate children for sexual abuse. So would you prefer that Nintendo require all online players be 18 or older? Then you wouldn't be able to tak

  • Wow. - Until reading this interview I wasn't even aware there was such a thing as Club Nintendo in other regions of the world. As a kid, I remember virtually drooling over the first Nintendo until I finally got one. I guess our "Club" really consisted of school. Many many hours spent talking about games with friends at school. Of course, there weren't any perks like what was mentioned about turning in UPCs for earning free stuff (ala kool-aid points I guess?), but still, since the earliest days of Ninte
    • So join me in boycotting Mario Galaxy until we get some good swag for doing so. Really, how hard would it be to give us some free Virtual Console downloads or something for buying games?!?! Geez, I bought a ton of games for GameCube and all I ever got was the Zelda collector's disc, and not even the cool one with the NES games.

      Where's my Limited Edition DS, you bitches?!!?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Yer Mum ( 570034 )
        In Europe you get Club Nintendo Points when you buy consoles and games. You're supposed to be able to convert these to Wii Shop Points so you can buy Virtual Console games... only they still haven't got round to doing it yet.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by KDR_11k ( 778916 )
          I bet they won't even get around to it before the first points expire so noone can bring their 5000+ points of unspent stars on the Wii. People accumulate that much because, even though you only get 250 per game and 500 per console plus 5 per day, the offerings you can buy for them suck and sell out within seconds. The stars catalogue (list of things you can redeem those stars for) gets updated maybe once a month with about 6 new items and a few hours later only "sold out" signs remaineven though most of th
          • I think you're a little confused by living in Europe and thinking that we have got anything decent in America. The best things we've ever gotten out of "MyNintendo" (that's the bullshit we get here) is a puffy sticker set to cover the GameCube and (iirc) a Metroid Prime demo disc or something. At least they promise you guys something decent, we don't even have points over here. Just once in a while you can register a game and get some little thing with it. Like the Wii remote keychain, but who wants to

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by KDR_11k ( 778916 )
              You could get that four Zelda game disc IIRC. That thing was NEVER added to the stars catalogue here.
    • I seem to be one of the few people who noticed the invitation to the "Nintendo Fun Club" that came with my NES. This was the original family set with ROB and the lightgun, but no mario bros.

      There was a color quarterly magazine, a monthly newsletter, and a membership card that would give me mad geek cred if I hadn't lost my wallet 8 years back...

  • Ug (Score:2)

    by RyoShin ( 610051 )

    Multiplayer: Can we talk about the Wii jacket for a minute?

    Kaplan: Sure. Wear you're jacket.
    No, Kaplan, YOU'RE the jacket.

    I shouldn't have expected much more from an MTV production, though.
    • No, she actually spelled it wrong.... verbally
      • Of course. That apostrophe and the 're', she accidently regurgitated those on the spot in mid-word. It was that silly English language she had for lunch, so full of its backward...ness.

    • Kaplan: Sure. We're your jacket.

      Kaplan: Sure. Where you're [the] jacket.

      Kaplan: Sure. WHERE YOUR JACKET!?!

      Kaplan: Sure. Where your jack, Kit?

      Kit: *whooshwhoosh* *whooshwhoosh*

  • I don't know what's sader (Score:3, Insightful)

    by shoptroll ( 544006 ) on Friday October 26, 2007 @07:28AM (#21127133)
    The fact that MTV is focusing on video games instead of music, or G4 failing to deliver exclusive interviews like this...

    (Doesn't matter anyways, in 5 years we'll have SpikeGMTV)
  • And what kind of a bow is it?
  • I always thought the seal of quality was done originally for their products dating back to the early NES days. At the time you had Tengen produced unlicensed 3rd party games that entirely by-passed the hardware lockout and I thought Nintendo established the Seal to guarantee people that Nitnendo had "signed off" on the games. Also, it was used for peripherals I thought to guarantee to users that the peripherals were guaranteed to work with Nitnendo systems.

    I've never ever thought that the Seal was used to

    • I've never ever thought that the Seal was used to say "we guarantee this game isn't a POS".
      How about "we guarantee that this software is a game, and not a piece of software that turns a Wii, a TV, a USB keyboard, and a USB barcode scanner into a computerized cash register [wikipedia.org]"?
    • Yes and no. Nintendo used to gaurentee that the game's content met certain standards for one. In the days before the ESRB, Nintendo policed content on their consoles. Remember the Mortal Kombat fiasco? Or perhaps read up on the story from one of the developers who ported Maniac Mansion to the NES [crockford.com].

      Secondly, the seal was a licensing gimick. Basicly during at least the early NES days, maybe all of the NES days, Nintendo would only license a certain number of titles for release withing a certain time perio
  • Multiplayer: Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime promised us a September surprise [on the Wii],and I never saw a September surprise.
    Kaplan: I don't know that he indicated which year.
    Multiplayer: Oh, September 2008, I'll look for the surprise then.

    Boy, this interview sure cleared that all up for me! Glad they got so in-depth with that question.

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