During Nintendo’s recent shareholder meeting, the topic of how Nintendo plans on leveraging its IPs in the future came up during a Q & A session. This included references to the Universal theme park and movie deals, as well as releasing game OSTs on iTunes and other platforms.
Here are the highlights:
Music from the Kirby game, Kirby: Planet Robobot, was recently released on iTunes. Are you planning to release any other soundtracks that are currently difficult to find and therefore carry a premium price? While the creation of new things is obviously important, I would also like to see you make better use of your IP and develop a business using some of your past work, including game music. Personally, I am looking forward to a Kirby animated series.
Shinya Takahashi, director: “Under our policy of making more active use of Nintendo IP, including game music, we are discussing a variety of developments. However, we are not able to make all content available due to various factors and circumstances. I hope you will understand that it is difficult to explain on this occasion what we can and cannot do.”
Shigeru Miyamoto, representative director: “Nintendo has taken another look at the content we own, especially since video games have been made more widely available for play on smart devices. Game music is one of the pillars of our content, so we released on iTunes some songs from Super Mario Odyssey, for example, for everyone to listen to.
Regarding the topic of animation, which you mentioned, we are currently producing a film with Illumination, the studio behind Minions, the Despicable Me series, plus the recent films, Sing and The Secret Life of Pets. The producer on this project (Chris Meledandri) and I were introduced each other by our Universal Parks & Resorts connections. As we continued our discussions, I realized that our companies are very similar in how we think and create, so we agreed to create an animated film that uses Mario. Regarding future IP utilization, rather than simply licensing our IP to others, we are working on several initiatives to be a content owner, just like we are doing with this film production, and expand the usage of our IP to build a new axis of our business. I hope you will look forward to these initiatives.”
You can read about how Nintendo is keeping their 20 million Switch sales goal for the current fiscal year in our previous report here.
