http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15360 

Nintendo President Iwata Keen To Avoid Arrogance

Speaking in a new interview with Newsweek’s N'Gai Croal, originally conducted during the E3 2007 event in July, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has spoken of his desire to avoid accusations of arrogance at the company following its current run of success.

Asked how he felt now that the perception of Nintendo within the industry had changed, from an assumption of failure to one of success, Iwata commented: “Being part of the entertainment industry, part of our job is to surprise our audiences … If you're introducing these new things and everyone's saying, ‘Oh yeah, this is great,’ ‘We'll take that,’ ‘That's a great idea,’ it's very difficult to maintain within the company the energy it takes to be always looking forward.”

“That's probably Nintendo's next obstacle is to not lose its internal energy and internal momentum. I believe my most important role right now is to prevent Nintendo from being in a company where people say, ‘Oh, Nintendo is arrogant,’ ‘Nintendo has let its guard down,’ or ‘Nintendo has lost its challenging spirit.’ We want to avoid all of the pitfalls that can come from losing one's momentum.”

In a wide ranging interview, Iwata also commented on fears expressed by some that Nintendo was abandoning its old hardcore audience with its push into the casual games market. “We have no intention of abandoning our core players and the people who have been Nintendo fans over the course of our history,” he said. “We really want to do a lot of unique things. So in the course of doing things that are unique, we're obviously going to, by the definition of the term, not produce some of the things people are expecting.”

“Looking at the titles Mario Galaxy, Smash Bros. and whatnot - those are hitting the latter phase of production right now. So we've already started moving manpower into new products, new titles, new themes. Still, we really believe that part of our mission is to make traditional games for our traditional audience,” he added.

Iwata commented multiple times that Nintendo was working on new games and intellectual properties not shown at E3, but implied it was now company policy not to reveal new titles as early as the firm had in the past.

I've always liked Iwata, and felt that when he became president of Nintendo was when I started giving a damn about them again (I definitely lost interest for large parts of last generation, which was the last one that old Crazy Pants spearheaded.)

Though I'm not sure Nintendo need more secrecy regarding their games.  Perhaps it's to keep the hype on this fall rather than shifting any focus to next year...

I was about to post the interview. This is a nice summary, though, with some of the more important points.

Well said, Rol.

Why create more Hype? So that more people are dissapointed when they can't find a Wii?

If you were talking to me, I didn't mean that it would create more hype, I meant that it would keep hype from being spread out.  Basically, I meant that, when everything exciting that people hear about coming out for the Wii is coming out this fall, rather than next year, when do you think they'll want to buy one?  And while demand currently exceeds supply, that's no reason to not use smart business practices and, well, not be arrogant, as Iwata said.

Oh. I wasn't.

I really like him. He's not one of those teflon-plated answering machines (all of NOA's staff, e.g.).

^Especially George Harrison, and excluding Reggie(most of the time)

What!! N is arrogant they don't even respond when they get critisised.

This is my favorite part of the interview. It talks about sharing information to promote growth.

"Another thing we've learned at Nintendo is how to disseminate the information to third parties on how to build a successful software for the Wii. Last month, we had a developer's conference sponsored by Nintendo. One thing that happened: the Wii sports programmers put together information on how to better utilize the motion sensor and how they utilized it in Wii sports. We gave that information out at the developers' conference. We've heard some rough feedback, and what I have heard is that some people were surprised that Nintendo was willing to give that sort of information out to other people. I mean, up to that point, Nintendo had a reputation of being very, very closed mouthed and close-fisted with that sort of information: develop it on our own, keep it to ourselves, and not being very friendly to outside developers.

Now I have a development background myself, so I really understood. I thought to myself "Hey, people want to know how we're doing this." I convinced a lot of people at Nintendo to allow us to give out all this information. Now, of course, there's the possibility of being imitated, having ideas taken from us before we're able to use them ourselves. But at the same time, if the industry doesn't grow, then we can't grow and we don't feel that the industry--we have to have the industry to survive so we may survive as well."

I wonder if this is why Medal of Honor Heroes controls have gotten some praise already. Hopefully Red Steel 2 will get some of this secret programming code.