Katherine Brice recently interviewed me for a piece she was doing about WiiWare and DSiWare and whether Nintendo are doing enough to promote the service. Her article can be found here. Below is a full transcript of the interview. Enjoy!
Hi Kath,
Thanks so much for emailing me in regards to this. Firstly let me introduce myself. My name is Nic Watt and I am the CEO and Creative Director of Nnooo. The following are my thoughts on the issue(s):
Is Nintendo doing enough to promote its Digital Services?
This is a hard question to answer as while I think that it is Nintendo’s responsibility to ensure that its customers are familiar with and using the DSiWare and WiiWare stores, I do not think it is Nintendo’s responsibility to promote and market every game on the service (that I think is the job of the developer or publisher). Overall I feel that Nintendo are doing a very good job making customers aware of these services for example:
Every Nintendo Wii now comes with a channel pre-installed which plays a video showing how to connect your Wii to the internet and what benefits you can get from this including WiiWare, the internet channel and Virtual Console.
- The internet channel on Wii and DSi is free
- This channel is a great way of getting all new customers to visit Nintendo’s online stores
The fact that the internet channel is one of the permanent top downloads on DSiWare suggests that many new DSi owners are connecting and downloading the channel. Which means they are familiar with and using the DSiWare store
There are several other free channels provided by Nintendo for both DSiWare and WiiWare for example Flipnote Studio and Everybody Votes. These are clearly downloaded by a lot of people and are therefore an indicator that a lot of consumers are at least familiar with the process of using the online stores
Every Nintendo DSi currently comes with 1000 free points to spend in the store. This means that every single user knows, on purchase, that their DSi can download new games and how to do so. To make use of these points the user must connect to the store. (more…)