More companies will have the chance to use popular Nintendo IP’s and characters by expanding their character licensing business.
The news was confirmed by Satoru Iwata who stated in a recent investor briefing:
We are planning to utilize Nintendo’s abundance of character IP more actively, I think the reason that Nintendo is now considered to have this ‘abundance of character IP’ is perhaps because of our passive approach toward the character IP licensing business, which tends to have a high risk of damaging the value of the character.
In other words, we think that spending time to develop our approach of having our characters appear mainly in our carefully selected games has created our current fortunate circumstances. However, we are going to change our policy going forward. To be more precise, we will actively expand our character licensing business, including proactively finding appropriate partners. In fact, we have been actively selling character merchandise for about a year in the US.
Also, we will be flexible about forming licensing relationships in areas we did not license in the past, such as digital fields, provided we are not in direct competition and we can form win-win relationships. By moving forward with such activities globally, we aim to increase consumer exposure to Nintendo characters by making them appear in places other than on video game platforms.
This could potentially be great news for the future of Nintendo allowing other companies to use their characters in future products. Be sure to let us know your thoughts via the comment section below.
Source: CVG
