Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has commented that the great success of first party titles on the Wii will ultimately help third parties on a long term basis. In turn, he conceeded that Nintendo's more than flattering dominance of Wii software sales will not carry on forever. The remarks come as Iwata was responding to claims that less than 50 percent of released Wii games come from third parties which is unusually low.

Quote:
I believe that third party publishers kind of look at the software titles that are being sold on Nintendo and they don't want Nintendo to have more than one-third, otherwise, Nintendo will be too strong. They want to have two-thirds of what's being sold on the platform. However, I believe that the job of first party software is to drive hardware. If you don't have a quick impact and quick dissemination amongst the audience, you lose momentum. If you don't have momentum, the third parties don't want to jump on your platform. So that's not a good situation to be in.

Actually, the same thing that happened to Wii, a lot of the same conversations took place when the DS was launched. And that's because Nintendo was really the only one that was very focused on that user expansion goal we've talked about so often and because we are creating unique software that no one else is creating, the phenomenon of Nintendo software selling was insane. So we had a very, very strong position and again, Nintendo was the only one really selling a lot of software. If you look at the beginning of this year, Nintendo-published software sales for the DS have slightly declined, and that's because third party has increased.

As far as the percentage of software for the Wii right now being first party software, we've been working towards this for a while, and I think it's unusual for Nintendo to have that strong a share at this point. However, I think that's a phenomenon that's going to be limited to this year alone. Next year, we're going to see a larger number of third party software. And I guess the impression of Nintendo is too powerful or too dominant will dissipate with again the increase in third party software.