14 DAY TRIAL // Nintendo has always been a popular company, largely due to the fact that it brought titles that appealed to a wide variety of gamers and gave players a great experience. Although some people say that, in this endeavor, the Japanese company lost track of the hardcore gamers, efforts are being made to keep the interest of experienced players.
Recently, in a conference where he was invited to talk about the new direction in which the entertainment industry was heading, Nintendo of America president, Reggie Fils-Aime, showcased the goal of the company in the following years. He said that the Japanese developer was focusing more and more on creating games that interacted with players, and allowed them to create their own content.
He then went on to elaborate on his statements regarding the popularity of games that interacted with users by presenting four Japanese titles that would be coming to the United States – Band Brothers Deluxe, Girls Mode, Nintendo DSi Moving Notepad and WarioWare Myself – and which would focus on user generated content, thus being sure to attract a lot of players, both casual and hardcore ones.
"Band Brothers Deluxe lets DS users compose their own music and then share it. Girls Mode is a game that lets players design their own clothing and then run their own fashion store. Nintendo DSi Moving Notepad can be thought as a flipbook animation, your own doodle pad turned into a little movie and with WarioWare Myself users can design their own mini-games and then play them against their friends," Fils-Aime said.
The executive went on stating that this strategy was already implemented in titles that were already launched, like Wii Music or Animal Crossing: City Folk. He then showed some titles that were oriented towards the hardcore gamer, like Punch-Out or Sin and Punishment 2, as an example of games custom made for different types of players.
All in all, some very interesting statements, and quite useful insight into the development strategy of the Japanese company in the following years. No doubt games that focus on user generated content are quite popular – just look at Spore or LittleBigPlanet – but the company really needs to sketch out boundaries to where this user creativity can be taken, or it might face some very severe backlash from users, as LBP has showed.