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Nintendo IS releasing enough first party games to propel its platforms forward.
That’s the message from senior MD Shigeru Miyamoto, who when accused of releasing insufficient titles to support Wii U told investors: I interpret the question as asking whether we are making the same mistake every time we launch a new hardware system.
While we are always working on this, I think you are right in the sense that we have not been able to deliver results. When we launched Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo DS, we were unable to release any games from any of our main Nintendo franchises to coincide with their launches. With Wii U, however, we released, along with the hardware, New Super Mario Bros U, as well as Nintendo Land, which was a very unique proposition.
If you look beyond, we also released a new instalment in the Pikmin series after a long interval, and we also had Super Mario 3D World at the end of last year. By the end of this year, we will have Mario Kart 8, as well as Super Smash Bros. Therefore, I feel that we have managed to overcome the challenge of releasing enough first-party franchises on Wii U.
So what is going wrong with Wii U then?
Our biggest downfall last year was that we failed to communicate the true value of Wii U, failed to make children persuade their parents to buy our products for them, and failed to offer products that parents could not resist,” Miyamoto added.
The company was also accused of failing to adequately spec the Wii U to survive competition from the likes of Xbox One and PS4.
I would like to mention that Wii U has massively evolved from Wii technologically,” Miyamoto continued. Using shader technology, for example, has significantly changed our development environment as well as our developers themselves and the time to develop games, all of which are areas toward which we have been making significant reinforcements.
Fellow senior MD Genyo Takeda added: Combining technology with entertainment creates machines. Under such circumstances, Nintendo tries not to emphasize the raw technical specifications of our hardware. We have focused on how we can use technology to amplify the value of our entertainment offerings, and in this sense, technology for us is something that stays in the background.
Therefore, I do not wish to make excuses for having so far failed to offer the ‘amplifier’ that our consumers can regard as having true entertainment value. Whether a machine is powerful or not only has meaning in the context of whether that can express itself in terms of gameplay to consumers, and I therefore do not intend to go into fine detail about the specific numbers.
I apologize for not directly answering your question, but it is my personal belief that explanations of such a nature have little relevance to consumers.”
