On that lineup, Zelda looks terrific, but there isn’t many games for day one. Does that not concern you?
Takahashi Certainly we look at it not just from the perspective of what are the games available on launch day but what we have from a lineup perspective not just from this year but into next year aswell. And speaking just about this year we have our launch games, Zelda and 1-2-Switch, and we’ve lined up so we’ve got great games launching in each season of this year. We’ll have Mario Kart shortly after launch, Arms in the Spring, the lineup continues after the holiday. This time we feel we’ve launched a system that has great games at launch in Zelda and 1-2-Switch but also a very strong lineup through the end of the year aswell.
Koizumi As you know we’ve been focussed on development on first party games, but with Nintendo Switch we’ve also put a lot of energy into making third-party cooperation possible, and that includes a lot of attention paid to the development environment that we are provided to these partners as well as the middleware we create for them. Soon you will a lot more announcements from third-party partners.
What kind of things are you doing to help woo third-parties onto Switch?
Koizumi I think a lot of it comes down to the development environment we’re providing because these are third-party providers that are bringing games to Nintendo hardware we want to do everything we can to make that experience comfortable for them including providing support for Unity or Unreal 4 which are platforms a lot of people are already using.
So one example I can give of this is SnipperClips which is made by a very small development team in England, which uses Unity so they were able to develop it very quickly.
So are you looking to have more independent developers on Switch?
Koizumi Yes, in fact we already have a lot of indie developers that we’re talking to, with several teams working on several different projects.
That haven’t been announced yet?
Both Yes (laughter)
