Nintendo Co., creator of Super Mario and Pokemon, brushed off Tuesday the technological superiority of rivals Sony and Microsoft in an emerging three-way war in next-generation home consoles.
President Satoru Iwata said Nintendo's Revolution, expected to go on sale next year, can compete against the more advanced offerings -- Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3, set to hit stores in spring 2006, and Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360, expected later this year -- because the era of creating powerful machines to attract sales is long over.
The Japanese game market has stagnated as people tire of increasingly complex games with more dazzling graphics, Iwata said at a briefing for reporters and investors at a Tokyo hotel.
Kyoto-based Nintendo Co. Ltd. has tried to expand the game-playing population, he said, by producing new kinds of machines, such as the handheld Nintendo DS, which has a touch screen, and new kinds of games that do not rely on increasingly sophisticated computer functions and graphics.
People who generally are not hard-core gamers, including women and the elderly, are having fun with "Nintendogs," a Nintendo DS game that allows players to interact with a puppy, Iwata said.
The game went on sale here in April and is set to go on sale in the United States in August.
More than 5.6 million Nintendo DS machines have been sold worldwide since their introduction about a half year ago.
Iwata said the game market is still expanding in the United States, unlike the troubled domestic market.