Fils-Aime: Nintendo Offers 'Full Meal' To iPhone's 'Small Chunks'

As an entertainment company, Nintendo competes with Apple's iPhone and its ever-growing suite of applications. But Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime says Nintendo's deep game offerings put the company in a favorable position against the App Store's more bite-sized offerings. "Consumers have only a limited amount of time for entertainment, so we compete with Apple," Fils-Aime said in a televised CNBC interview today. "We compete with your program [on CNBC]; we compete with books and magazines; we compete with everything people do for entertainment. From that standpoint, we're battling it out minute by minute." When anchor Maria Bartiromo pointed out the vast number of available iPhone apps relative to the amount of software available for Wii and Nintendo DS, Fils-Aime stressed the depth available on Nintendo platforms. This is a potentially notable angle, given Nintendo's success in recent years as marketing its platforms as less time-consuming, more accessible alternatives to the more hardcore-slanted systems. "While they have a lot of these applications, they're very small chunks of entertainment," Fils-Aime said. "What we do is, we provide a full meal in terms of a game you could play for hours on end -- very deep very enriching -- and that's why our handheld business has been doing so well all year long." As for competing with Microsoft and Sony, Fils-Aime said the key is to "continually innovate," particularly with games for a wider audience. Such games "come from everyday life," he said, referencing oft-told stories about Shigeru Miyamoto's daily routine influencing his design: "When he gets a new pet, he creates a game like Nintendogs. When he gets concerned about his weight, he creates a game like Wii Fit." "It really comes from everyday life," Fils-Aime concluded, "and I think that's what makes our games so broadly appealing."