Nintendo of America Presisent Reggie Fils-Aime took a moment out of his insane schedule during this year’s Game Developer’s Conference to field a few questions, and one of the most interesting of the topics that was discussed has to be Nintendo’s perspective on third-party support.
Industry Gamers pointed out to Fils-Aime that the Wii is going strong on console exclusive in-house titles, and asked him why Nintendo should even care what the third-party folks are up to. Here’s his response:
“Well, luckily we don’t have that mentality. For us, it is important that third parties bring their very best content to our platform. You could say ‘Why?’ It’s because… well, let me focus in on the West. There are 28 million Wiis out there in the marketplace. We know, based on our data, that we’ve got consumers from 5 to 95 playing on that platform.
The fact of the matter is we know we create great content for younger consumers, we know we’ve got great content for more casual players, and we want fantastic content for that more active player who loves Metroid or Zelda but maybe also wants something like a BioShock 2 to play as well. And we also recognize that we don’t create that type of content ourselves. We’re not good at it and it’s not a key focus area. So we want that content on our platform, so we have to court third-party developers and encourage them to make [those games], but it also has to be financially viable for them as well.”
Nintendo has always been focused on expanding gaming from a niche market into a mainstream one, so this explanation doesn’t come as much of a surprise. I think their design philosophy has always leaned on accessibility and fun over technology and visuals; it makes sense that they’d be looking at third-party developers to fill in that gap.
This is where the other game companies have always misfired – they engage in a hardware race to create games that impress gamers, while Nintendo quietly works on games that everyone can enjoy. I think this generation of the console wars has already proven which is the better tack to take, but we’ll just have to wait and see if the industry can process this information into any sort of positive forward movement.
