14 DAY TRIAL // The video game industry might aim to deliver more mature and serious stories, but it seems that Nintendo currently has no plans to abandon its own approach and will continue to focus on fun and goofy narratives and core gameplay mechanics.
Shigeru Miyamoto, the leading game creator at the company, is quoted by VG247 as saying that, “It’s not that I don’t like serious stories or that I couldn’t make one, but currently in the video game industry you see a lot of game designers who are working really hard to make their games seem really cool. For a lot of us at Nintendo, it’s difficult to decide what cool is.”
Nintendo is famous for the fact that it does not follow industry trends and insists on working on its video games without trying to replicate any ideas that are popular among players during the development process.
Miyamoto ads, “In fact, it’s a lot easier for us to laugh at ourselves. It’s almost as if we’re performers. Our way of performing is by creating these fun, odd and goofy things.”
The approach has served the company very well for years and allowed it to turn the likes of Mario and Zelda into some of the biggest franchises in the world of gaming.
They in turn generated big hardware sales and made the DS and the classic Wii platforms that managed to be attractive to players despite their relative limited hardware power.
Unfortunately, the company has failed to replicate their success with the new Wii U home console, which has only delivered 2.8 million in sales for the last year, when Nintendo was expecting for it to move 9 million units to gamers.
The launch of Mario Kart 8 has provided it with a solid boost and another increase in sales is expected when Super Smash Bros. arrives for the Wii U before the end of the year.
The fighting game has a very loyal fan base and if they all pick up the new console, Nintendo might become a solid competitor for both Sony and Microsoft.
During E3 2014, the company also revealed a new Legend of Zelda title, which will use an open world structure and all the computing power of the Wii U to create a beautiful and vibrant world.
The development team working on it says that it will be offered at some point in 2015.