Why Nintendo Doesn’t Need E3

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Why Nintendo Doesn’t Need E3

By David ⋅ July 21, 2008

Shigeru Miyamoto is now on record telling a reporter from MSNBC that E3 isn’t the venue for announcing the core games for the Nintendo Wii.  While that explanation sounds to a lot of people like a pallid excuse for Nintendo’s lackluster showing at E3, I think it’s perfectly valid reasoning.  First and foremost, Nintendo couldn’t give two shits about hardcore gamers.   So why would they rush development on a premier franchise game for an audience made up of mostly hardcore gamers, who even if the latest and greatest Zelda game were announced, would still be disappointed by it.  Or, even worse, that same top-shelf offering could get upstaged by a rival announcing the latest and greatest pixel pushing game that looks like a two-dimensional holodeck.  All of that aside, E3 has become sort of small and cloistered now that entry is limited to invited parties.  Reports from past E3’s have made it seem like some free-for-all circus catering to geeks, but at least it was a circus that was open to all.  Nintendo should follow the lead of Apple Inc. regarding big product announcements.  Send out invitations to the press, with some kind of cryptic clue as to what will actually be announced, preferably on a day when it would be difficult for the competition to respond.  That way when the announcement is made all of the attention is focused on Nintendo, possibly for days or weeks to come.

Secondly, I think Nintendo will only make only two or three A-list titles for the Wii per year.  This isn’t to say that there won’t be more titles like Boom Blox or No More Heroes but unless Nintendo’s third party developers step up to the plate, expect to see many more titles along the lines of Cooking Mama.  But just looking at first and second party Wii games from the perspective of sales numbers, games that employ minigames seem to be much more popular than the traditional long platforming titles that are Nintendo’s bread and butter.  Case and point: Wii Play, a game that has gotten sub-par reviews, is one of top selling, and top played Wii games to date.  I found this hard to believe myself, until I visited my little cousins (aged 12 and 9) with some of my games in hand, and saw that they became bored with Mariokart Wii within thirty minutes.  When Marioparty 8 was loaded in their attention was drawn for hours on end, mainly because of the minigames between every turn of the game.  The 9 year old liked it so much that he told his mom on the spot that he wanted Marioparty for Christmas.  So, either thirtysomething-year old game reviewers have much different tastes than the target audience for kiddie games (likely), or minigames are fun to play with other people especially if those people are young (more likely).

 

Finally, games like Wii Sports/Play don’t break the bank with development costs or marketing, or hiring top-grade vocal talent.  The latter point might be why Nintendo declined to include any voice support in Twilight Princess.  For those who think that voice talent should be included in every game: Can you tell me who Link is supposed to sound like?  Should he sound like Legolas, or more prissy, like your kid sister? Though I could see Nintendo getting Jack Nicholson to voice Ganon.  Another plus for the minigame games is the short game duration, almost anyone can take 10 minutes out of their day to play a round of Wii Tennis,  and with someone else to play with the game is absurdly fun.  This is another example of Nintendo playing to their base, Wii Sports is really fun for the two kids looking to pass some time during the summer, but for a thirty something living alone in a college-town apartment, it would suck ass compared to a lengthy single player adventure like Bioshock, which cost millions of dollars to develop.  With their strategy of making little games that don’t cost a lot of money to make, the big N is both appealing to the sort of people that would embrace the Wii in the first place, and making a tremendous profit per unit sold.  And it’s surely those very profits that lead Miyamoto to announce recently on CNN that he is abandoning the hardcore-friendly Mario franchise.  Say it ain’t so, Shiggy!!! 

 

For those who are waiting for Nintendo to make the next game-changing console game, I’d suggest biding your time by playing some classic Nintendo games, or Team Fortress 2, that’s what I do.

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