Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa has rejected the idea that the company hasn't had new gameplay ideas to rival the Wii Remote in the 20 years since its release.
"It feels like we recently haven't seen any proposals for new approaches to gameplay that can rival the Wii Remote controller," one attendee at the latest Nintendo investors meeting observes. "Has developing new ways to play become less of a priority?"
This prompted a response from Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa, senior managing executive officer Shinya Takahashi, and senior executive officer Ko Shiota. "Creating new ways to play through integrated hardware-software development has in no way become less of a management priority" Furukawa says, adding that "providing unique forms of entertainment as only Nintendo can is vital for us." This is something that the company will "continue to place a high priority on."
Takahashi explains that the hardware and software teams "come together as one" to develop new ways to play while leveraging what the hardware has to offer from a performance and feature standpoint, but "the use of new features is not the goal in and of itself."
He adds, "our basic approach is to first come up with fun ways to play, consider what hardware features would be necessary to realize those ways to play, and then make the most of those features."
"Hardware and software developers coming together as one, sharing ideas, and repeatedly going through trial and error to come up with new forms of entertainment can be seen as a long-standing part of Nintendo's development culture," Shiota says, citing his own experiences as a developer. He adds, "Only a handful of ideas become actual products after much trial and error, but we believe it's crucial for management to invest in activities that lead to new forms of enjoyment."
Nintendo hasn't had a platform that completely reinvents the wheel since the Wii. Yes, there's the Wii U, but that was pretty much a traditional console with an extra screen – and few developers made meaningful use of the gamepad. At the same time, Nintendo caught a bit of flak over the Switch 2 simply being a better Switch and not some radical redesign. But while the Wii's motion controls were extremely novel 20 years ago, a similar design gimmick would be a lot less exciting today.
