E3 might have finished months ago, but interviews from the Media & Business Summit are still trickling onto the web. The latest is Newsweek’s, a chat with Nintendo’s president Satoru Iwata in which he speaks of Nintendo’s future as it attempts to make the most of the success of the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS.

The Nintendo boss man explained that it was important for Nintendo not to rest on its laurels now that the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS are the world’s leading consoles in both the home and portable markets. He noted that Nintendo really didn’t want to fall into the trap of becoming arrogant with its status:

“I believe my most important role right now is to prevent Nintendo from being in a company where people say, ‘Oh, Nintendo is arrogant, Nintendo has let its guard down’, or ‘Nintendo has lost its challenging spirit’. We want to avoid all of the pitfalls that can come from losing one’s momentum.”

Nintendo plans to keep itself grounded explains Iwata.

Iwata went on to speak about the importance of finding a balance between first and third party software titles on both consoles, and about the perception of Nintendo-made games overshadowing any outside developer’s chances:

“I believe that third party publishers kind of look at the software titles that are being sold on Nintendo and they don’t want Nintendo to have more than one-third, otherwise, Nintendo will be too strong. They want to have two-thirds of what’s being sold on the platform.

“However, I believe that the job of first party software is to drive hardware. If you don’t have a quick impact and quick dissemination amongst the audience, you lose momentum. If you don’t have momentum, the third parties don’t want to jump on your platform. So that’s not a good situation to be in.

There was also talk about the Kyoto-based firm’s tough decision to let third party developers in on the secrets Nintendo has for pushing the videogames industry forward. For so long Nintendo has been known as painfully secretive (sometimes to the detriment of third parties and itself):

“I convinced a lot of people at Nintendo to allow us to give out all this information. Now, of course, there’s the possibility of being imitated, having ideas taken from us before we’re able to use them ourselves. But at the same time, if the industry doesn’t grow, then we can’t grow and we don’t feel that the industry–we have to have the industry to survive so we may survive as well.”

We for one are glad Nintendo is turning a corner in its embrace of third party software houses. A lack of outside support was one of the primary reasons for the downfall of both the Nintendo 64 and Nintendo GameCube, so anything the Wii can do to change that perception has got to be positive.

Head over to Newsweek to read the full interview.