Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa On Content Regulation

In Nintendo’s annual meeting of shareholders, president and CEO Shuntaro Furukawa participated in their Q&A session, where he commented on recent regulations and Nintendo’s approach on the subject.

Question: Recently, there’s been concerns surrounding depictions of entertainment, and I hear that platforms of other companies not only require third party organization age ratings from CERO, ESRB, and such, but also require applications based on their own regulations. Can you tell us how Nintendo tackles this issue for games that release for its platforms?

Shuntaro Furukawa, President: “For games that release on our company’s consoles, assuming they acquire the rating from said third party organizations, we like to have our customers understand about software content and target age through objective information. As a company that manages platforms, if we were to arbitrarily decide which software gets released and which doesn’t, I believe it would be an impediment to video game diversity and fairness.

Again, our company’s game consoles have functions that allow guardians to add user restrictions, so guardians can set passwords to ‘Not display content that may be harmful to children’.”