StreetPass premium games pulled over 200,000 sales in a week

Nintendo's new StreetPass games, which are sold as DLC through a newly-added shop in Mii Plaza, have been quite popular already.

The new games generated significant sales within their first week, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata confirmed during the much-quoted investor Q&A.

"We only started distributing those new games a week ago, but already more than 200,000 consumers had purchased at least one out of those four games by last Sunday," he said.

"We employed no mass-media advertising so we think we are off to a good start. I think that products like these ones will provide new business opportunities for Nintendo in the future."

Iwata's comments came in response not so much ato a question but to a rather refreshingly non-hostile comment from an investor asking Nintendo to pursue similar development in the future.

"We have until now been trying to create an environment in users can experience the StreetPass feature, so our objective was to create something that was simple and easy to understand. But we feel that the next step for us to take is to create games that are deeper, and we have actually been working on them for quite some time," Iwata noted in response.

The executive said Nintendo has been introduced in releasing DLC-style titles for some time, with the example of Wii Motion: Play brought up, but said the Wii wasn't ready for such a business model.

"But we now have the environment where we can do such things, and as we considered what we could do with Nintendo 3DS, we felt that it might be interesting to expand StreetPass Mii Plaza by adopting a similar (competition-style) model that we took in the past," he said.

"We would certainly like to consider new possibilities for our future endeavours."

Nintendo has been investigating ways to make StreetPass more rewarding for western users, and has determined to introduce WiFi hotspot relays to North America and Europe.

Thanks, Vooks.