Nintendo doesn't plan to focus on making a Skylanders-style game

Nintendo Figurine Platform isn't a direct competitor to Skylanders and Disney Infinity, apparently; the big N has other plans for its NFC-enabled figures.

Nintendo announced the new platform during an investor briefing last week, but president Satoru Iwata gave ore details during a newly-translated Q&A.

"As for utilizing character figurines, Activision has released video game titles from the Skylanders series over the past three years and Disney Interactive released the software title, Disney Infinity, last year. Both video game series are compatible with character figurines and have created an extremely large market for these products. In the overseas markets especially, a huge amount of space has been allocated to those product lines at retail stores with a large market presence," Iwata observed.

"Our primary focus, however, is not to develop software that is compatible with figurines. Rather, we have been developing figurines since last year because we believe there may be different approaches or ways to appeal to consumers by using them, and this could also be one way for Nintendo to utilize its character IP."

As you may remember, in January Nintendo said it's looking at licensing its character IP to other companies.

"Today, I decided to talk about our own project," Iwata said.

"Still nothing has changed in our belief that, for video game platforms, hardware is driven by software and our basic approach of developing new, unique and incredibly interesting software has not changed at all. We will work hard to meet your expectations."

Speaking of expectations, Iwata expects Nintendo to be able to please shareholders within the next few fiscal years.

"I feel that in the next fiscal year we will be able to be more specific about the kinds of mid-term projects that we discussed at the Corporate Management Policy Briefing in January, and in fact, we will even start to offer some of them to the public," he said.

"In the following fiscal year, I expect some of these measures to start serving as a source of profits for the company. In this sense, instead of seeing a great and sudden recovery in our profitability in the next fiscal year, I am rather expecting to be able to report Nintendo-like profits from around the following fiscal year."