Wada-san Wants to Gain Nintendo Gamers' Trust

Speaking in an interview with EDGE, Yasuhiro Wada of Marvelous has stated Marvelous needs to gain gamers' trust, especially owners of Nintendo platforms. Whilst it has brought either well-known games like Harvest Moon, or highly-rated ones like Arc Rise Fantasia to Wii, so far sales have not been anywhere near as high as many would have expected. Wada-san, one of the main directors at Marvelous Entertainment and the creator of Harvest Moon, believes that whilst certain companies can sell their games on reputation alone, sadly Marvelous does not have such a level of trust amongst the gaming community. Some think it is mainly due to the Wii not being suitable for 'core' games, yet Wada disagrees, stating Nintendo's system is definitely not to blame:

I don't think it is about the platform. Of course it can't offer the same level of performance and HD visuals of the other high spec platforms. Having the possibility to display 100 characters on screen where you would be limited to 30 on the Wii won't make the game any more fun. This is not where the essence of video gaming is. I remember having some incredible fun on the very first black and white GameBoy. Today, you have plenty of beautiful games that are not very fun to play. So it is not about the hardware.

The reason why our games are not selling as much we would like could be found in the name of our company. Marvelous has just reached the point its games are getting noticed and getting good reviews. But we are not a major name yet. The Marvelous brand is still associated to some not so good titles we made in the past. We are yet to gain the brand value of companies like Nintendo, Capcom or Square Enix. Even if you don't fully understand what a title is about, because it's branded Nintendo, Capcom or Square Enix, you feel like ok to buy and try it. A Marvelous game has yet to gain such recognition and trust from users. Now, if you consider the big but very light population of casual users, they don't know about Marvelous at all. This population is by far the majority on the Wii. So in that sense, you could indeed think the Wii factor is working against us. But at the same time, if you consider games like Umbrella Chronicles, Biohazard 4 or a Tales Of RPG on the same Wii, you find that those games sell more than 200,000 or 300,000 copies. So there is a gamer market on the platform. I'm sure there are potentially about a million of them. So we need to gain the trust of these users.