Sony Gaming Prez Doesn’t Believe the 3DS Analog Attachment or Price Drop Have Anything to Do with Vi

A lot of people have been looking at recent Nintendo decisions like the price drop and the announcement of the second Circle Pad attachment and thinking “it looks like Nintendo’s trying to keep up with the PlayStation Vita. They must really be in trouble.” But the funny thing is, Sony Computer Entertainment president Shuhei Yoshida actually disagrees. For him, it’s all about the 3DS trying to keep up with its own needs.

It’s obviously clear that whatever plans Nintendo had in mind for spreading 3DS to the world didn’t quite pan out, so things like adding a second analog stick and cutting the price are ways to reach out to what would otherwise have been unwilling consumers so Nintendo could meet its bottom-line. That said, Yoshida looks forward to healthy competition between systems in the future, even if that competition doesn’t necessarily involve modifying hardware in response to the opposition.

You can see his quote on the subject (from a Game Informer interview) below:

It’s suspicious that Nintendo is releasing a second circle pad attachment for the 3DS after gamers universally praised the Vita’s dual analog sticks. Can you talk about what looks like an attempt by Nintendo to keep up with Sony?

Well it’s not like they looked at PS Vita and said “we need to do that as well.” I don’t know. It’s clear that they didn’t believe a second analog was necessary when they designed the 3DS, so I can only guess it was requested by Capcom’s side. Maybe a Capcom producer told Nintendo that to play Monster Hunter we need [two] analog sticks. That I don’t know, so I can only guesstimate. It was a bit shocking to see what they came up with.

Touching on the 3DS again, it seems like Nintendo responded to the Vita’s low price tag by dropping the 3DS’ cost even lower. It appears to be a direct response from Nintendo. Is it exciting to see Nintendo, which has had a death grip on the handheld market, seemingly react to the Vita’s hype?

I don’t personally believe that they dropped the price of the 3DS to respond to our pricing. We didn’t price PS Vita to their price, either. We had that plan since the last couple years. My personal guesstimate is that they have their business plan and goals to sell a certain amount of 3DS units, and they realized post-launch was that the pricing was not helping them to achieve the goal that they set. That’s my estimate. As far as if I’m excited, I’m not sure. If the 3DS sells like crazy and no one is interested in PS Vita, that’s a problem. There are lots of analysts talking about, “well, you know there are smart phones, there’s no need for dedicated portable game machines.” I don’t believe it. But if they point to certain performance of the 3DS and say the smartphone is here, it doesn’t help us either. I like to see healthy competition between Nintendo’s system and ours because it helps innovation. It’s always a good thing to have.

Personally, I wasn’t really sure what to think about the reasoning behind those recent announcements! I mean, I knew it had something to do with driving a 3DS recovery going into the holidays, but I wasn’t sure what the motivation behind some of these specific decisions was. I’ve got to admit, I was a little worried that the Vita’s pricing and dual-analog additions may have been the driving forces – but if even Sony doesn’t believe that’s the case, then I think I can safely drop those suspicions.

Source: Game Informer via MyNintendoNews