Miyamoto discusses Nintendo’s failure to demonstrate the “true value of Wii U”

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Nintendo’s legendary Shigeru Miyamoto has shared his thoughts on the company’s current struggles behind Wii U, revealing that re-organising their resources to adapt to HD development created a “huge bottleneck” to their creative processes in timely releasing first-party software.

“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 admitted.

“What we can do about it from now on is our theme. As Mr. Iwata explained earlier, we are confident that Nintendo Land offered compelling as well as Nintendo-like gameplay experiences for, say, four or five people when they gathered in the living room by taking full advantage of the two screens, but some of the single-player experiences were rather weak.”

Nintendo have already signalled their goal to “enrich the value of the Wii U GamePad,” showing how it can benefit single-player experiences after concentrating their attention on multiplayer-orientated concepts.

Miyamoto continued, “It is my conviction that we will need to put more focus on creating experiences that utilise the GamePad that can also be fully enjoyed when playing alone. The fact that the GamePad and the TV interact as soon as Wii U is switched on is very important as it means that our consumers are always able to enjoy stable gaming experiences. Unlike a tablet device with a TV, the two screens are always connected when they are switched on. In terms of user experience, we are currently working on the amount of time it takes to load a game, but it is very important that we have a guaranteed environment in which the GamePad and the TV are connected. We know that having such an environment allows for various useful propositions for the living room, and we have continued to develop software in this spirit.

It is Nintendo’s shift to HD development that has perhaps caught them off-guard, games taking far longer to make as the company tinkers them to near perfection as their fans would expect. To overcome such challenges they have turned to external aid to speed their processes, such as Namco Bandai helping with Super Smash Bros., although Miyamoto believes that the learning curve will at least aid their efforts on future hardware.

“In terms of our efforts toward ensuring that we supply the market with adequate titles at all times, although it may come across as an excuse, I would like to mention that Wii U has massively evolved from Wii technologically,” he pinpointed.

“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. Although we have recreated some of our past games for Wii U, we are actually trying to use many outside developers to help us do so, while we focus our internal resources on making new games. I feel confident that we have made a significant improvement in this regard.

“Moreover, we are trying to cut down the time it takes to create a suitable development environment as it has proven to be a huge bottleneck, and we are continuing to make improvements in this area across the whole company, too. I think that we will be able to smoothly carry out the process of upgrading Nintendo franchises and offering them to our consumers in a stable fashion on future systems.”

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