Nintendo Eyes User Generated Content, Says "Entertainment Is A Two-Way Street"

Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime spoke at today's BMO Capital Markets Interactive Entertainment Conference, starting his presentation with a look at the landscape of the five most popular web sites in 1996. Fils-Aime pointed out that each was a search engine, "gathered and controlled by someone else." "They were, essentially, the world's best library cards," he said. "But if you look at the top five most visited sites today, you'll find content composed almost entirely by users for the benefit of other users." This, Fils-Aime explained "is the game changer" for every form of entertainment. "As entertainment changes, we will keep pace," he said. Fils-Aime pointed to four titles coming from Japan as new initiatives that focus specifically on user-generated content: Band Brothers Deluxe, Girls Mode, Nintendo DSi Moving Notepad and WarioWare Myself."Band Brothers Deluxe lets DS users compose their own music and then share it. Girls Mode is a game that lets players design their own clothing and then run their own fashion store. Nintendo DSi Moving Notepad can be thought as a flipbook animation, your own doodle pad turned into a little movie and with WarioWare Myself users can design their own mini-games and then play them against their friends," Reggie explained. The Nintendo president also focused on fourth quarter titles like Wii Music and Animal Crossing: City Folk as indicative of the company's strategy for putting creation tools in the hands of gamers. Fils-Aime also highlighted the company's "core gamer" focused titles, attempting to counter "non-game" trolling with "If there were journalists here today from core gamer sites, they'd be grousing 'Yeah, well, what about us?'" He showed off the more traditional titles Punch-Out!!, Sin & Punishment 2 and The Conduit in video form as the kind of content that will appeal to those less interested in the "blue ocean" offerings. Of course, it wouldn't be a Reggie presentation without some sales bragging. Fils-Aime pointed out that the Nintendo DS has reached an install base of 23 million units in the U.S. alone, with more than 12 million Wiis sold over the past two years.