The American face of Nintendo, President and Chief Operating Officer Reggie Fils-Aime, once said, "I'm about kicking ass, I'm about taking names."
Nintendo hasn't been kicking much ass over the past few years — the company posted a $456 million operating loss in its last fiscal year, its third loss in a row. Though the original Nintendo Wii console was a hit with consumers, the new version, Nintendo's Wii U, flopped.
Critics wonder why Nintendo doesn't take a leap by creating or licensing content for mobile devices many consumers already own.
Recently, Nintendo released Mario Kart 8 to rave reviews and more than a million sales in its first weekend. At this year's E3, or Electronic Entertainment Expo, the company announced a new intellectual property, Splatoon, a family friendly take on multiplayer third-person shooters (using paint guns instead of gun guns). Splatoon uses the GamePad to display a map that allows players to instantly teleport around the arena by touching a teammate's location.
NPR sat down with Reggie Fils-Aime at E3 in Los Angeles to ask him a range of questions about Nintendo's present and future.
People are saying that Nintendo is the underdog, since Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox are selling better. What do you say when people say that?
Both of those other competitors have other business lines, so by definition we are a smaller company, so by definition we must be the underdog. In terms of sales, the fact of the matter is that the sales will ebb and flow with the momentum of the software. For us, we are seeing a lot of momentum in our business with the launch of Mario Kart 8. We believe with the pacing of launches that we have over the next number of weeks that we'll continue to see very strong momentum. For our competitors, much of the content they showed was 2015 content, so over the next number of months through this holiday we'll see in terms of who sells the most.
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