Nintendo Delays

By now we’re all familiar with the infamous Nintendo delay, which is the showcasing of titles like Pikmin 3 and The Wonderful 101 as launch window titles for the Wii U, only to have them delayed indefinitely. Both fans and press have voiced their frustration with Nintendo over the delays and Satoru Iwata has finally given a reason as to why this phenomenon continues to occur with every new console.

In a recent question and answer session over the recent financial report, Iwata stated that Nintendo planned to release the games earlier, but wanted to take time to give the developers a chance to add several layers of polish to ensure customers are truly happy with their games.

“The brand of a franchise would be completely degraded without customer satisfaction. This is why we delayed the release schedule of such games.”

Iwata further goes on to say that titles like Pikmin 3 experienced such a long delay because the development team for Pikmin 3–as well as other development teams–were understaffed during the period between the announcement and the expected release date. As such, Iwata stated that it’s impossible to identify one specific bottleneck when it comes to software development.

“These days it is becoming increasingly challenging to determine the minimum development resources required for customer satisfaction. A delicately crafted game will never fail to appeal to consumers.”

With the recent Aliens: Colonial Marines fiasco, Iwata hits the nail on the head when it comes to quality. Most consumers would rather weather a delay and receive a product that truly shines than to have a product shipped out the door that only delivers half of what was promised for the same price. It’s also nice to see Iwata speaking so candidly about Nintendo’s past performance and the future direction the company intends to go, as the company has previously been very tight-lipped on release delays and performance reports.

...