You know that huge fan movement started here at Zelda Informer a few years back? The one that Aonuma has publicly acknowledged several times? Operation Moonfall? Yeah, that one.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Operation Moonfall and related fan ventures, such as our namesake Operation Rainfall, actually don’t affect Nintendo in any way. Or so says Reggie.

Going off of that, how much do what fans want or say influence your decisions? [Operation Moonfall and Operation Rainfall are cited as examples here.] I have to tell you—it doesn’t affect what we do. We certainly look at it, and we’re certainly aware of it, but it doesn’t necessarily affect what we do. I’ll give you an example. I mentioned earlier that our head of product development had a bet on X versus Y—we also had a bet around localizing Xenoblade. .. I wanted to bring Xenoblade here. The deal was, how much of a localization effort is it? How many units are we going to sell, are we going to make money? … The thing we know [about petitions] is that 100,000 signatures doesn’t mean 100,000 sales.

Reggie is certainly right that 100,000 signatures does not mean 100,000 sales, and I’m sure his story about

Xenoblade is spot-on. But given the eventual releases of Pandora’s Tower and The Last Story in the United States, I don’t know how much stock I’d put into this—just because Nintendo isn’t affected doesn’t mean companies like XSEED won’t take notice. However, it’s still interesting to think about—I’d certainly hope our movement doesn’t mean nothing to the Big N.

Source: Siliconera