Following Nintendo's first-half fiscal results, in which the company saw its profits double to 132.42 billion yen (US$1.16 billion) thanks to the Wii and DS, corporate management held a lengthy financial Q&A session to answer a variety of questions about Nintendo's business now and in the future.

One of the typical problems associated with Nintendo platforms is that Nintendo's own titles tend to outshine those from third parties. After Nintendo President Satoru Iwata admitted that his company learned from making a mistake that left a bug in one of their games, he said that they've taken steps to ensure quality. He added, however, that another important aspect of quality is to ensure that a game is fun.

"... since we are aiming to expand the total gaming population, we need to think in terms of whether software can be played by people who are not very familiar with video games," he said. "From this perspective, testing must not only be done by our internal groups with deep knowledge of video games, but also we are trying to investigate, for example, how people in their 50s without any deep knowledge on video games will react when they first start playing a title...and what kinds of problems they will face."

Nintendo icon Shigeru Miyamoto emphasized Iwata's point and he noted that management needs to challenge developers to be creative. "There is no question about the fact that quality is important. However, to entertain customers, it also must be fun. So, we all need to maintain an environment where we can play both good offense and defense, where we will always be trying to create something new while maintaining quality," he said.

"If I may add, creating something brand new requires a lot of courage. If managers are trying to exercise too tight control, young developers will not dare challenge them. Management has to urge young developers to dare to challenge traditions even when they are scared to do so. We are urging that kind of mindset and are trying to create a system to build even better human interactions inside our company," he continued. "We are establishing software development groups from a technical point of view, with veteran developers who have the experience of playing major roles in developing other software assigned the job of providing quality control and technical assistance between different development teams. Today, those kinds of activitiy are already taking place rather actively. As active communication and interaction among Nintendo employees are being promoted, we are eager to include younger and capable engineers who can work among them."

That's all well and good for Nintendo, but how can third parties take better advantage of Nintendo platforms? Shinji Hatano (General Manager, Marketing Division) explained his company's stance and efforts to help third parties.

"The third party software makers have been making their own efforts to increase the quality level of their software. When it comes to DS and Wii, since we introduced our new control mechanisms, sometimes software makers approach us and sometimes we advise them as to how they can incorporate DS's touch panel without letting users feel stress, and how the movement and the manipulation of the Wii Remote can best be reflected on the display screen," he said. "We are inviting our internal developers to take part in such dialogues. Since we should not be telling these third party developers what they should do in terms of the game content per se, we are offering advice and cooperation in order to produce software which is accessible to users with the least possible stress."

Occasionally Nintendo will even lend third parties a hand by offering help from internal talent. "Sometimes we let our internal developers be involved in some aspects of the third party software development when our involvement can be expected to create new elements in the game. Of course, we can not assign too many of our internal developers for all these projects, so we are asking the third party developers to create their own internal team which can work closely with our developers. Such a joint-working relationship has actually born fruit in our first party title called Flash Focus, with which Bandai-Namco was involved in development," Hatano said.

Iwata, Miyamoto and others address many other topics in the full Q&A, linked above.