Japanese Developers Welcome Nintendo DS

In an article in Japanese consumer magazine Famitsu Weekly various Japanese developers have had their opinions polled regarding Nintendo’s recently announced “DS” portable console. Sonic Team head Yuji Naka has stated that he can’t wait to see the DS debut and that he hopes to be able to have a game ready for its launch. Cozy Okada from Atlus has said that he feels the combination of two screens and two CPUs will enable new game concepts, but that turning those new concepts into reality is a key to the future success of the games industry. United Game Artist head Tetsuya Mizuguchi meanwhile, has said that he hopes that it can encourage an evolution in player’s brains. Some developers though were more guarded in their comments with Namco’s Akira Yoshizumi commenting that the Nintendo DS will be a stretch to creates games for. Despite these largely positive reactions though a poll of developers asking whether they would develop for the new format found that only 10% had already decided to do so, while 33% had decided against and 56.7% were undecided. Another poll asking whether people were looking forward to the device in general was less ambiguous with 93.3% of developers, 64.4% of retailers and 62.2% of end users answering “yes”. Source: 1up, The Magic Box