MGIS: Kideki Konno keynote

[A week ago I attended the Montreal Game Summit. I'm only getting around now to posting some notes from the sessions, and will do the posts, one-per]

Nintendo’s Hideki Konno “What we have learned from Nintendogs”. This was an interesting look into how Nintendogs went from concept (Miyamoto said “do something with dogs”) to retail product, and gave some insight into Nintendo and how they work. The biggest eye-opener for me was the fact that the game designers themselves (not the game PM or marketing team – the actual designer) sits down with the marketing folk to talk about how the game should be sold. Nintendogs multiple SKUs didn’t start out as a money-making scheme. It started out as the designers saying “we want the area of the store to feel like a pet store”. The original plan called for fifteen different SKUs but it was decided that three-to-five would be manageable.