Speaking with Famitsu this week, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto shared his opinion that people “are no longer just looking for specs” when it comes to gaming systems.
The Japanese magazine brought up how Nintendo has been focusing on new ways to play since the Wii and DS era. That’s when the company really started to make specs less of a focus. Wii was underpowered compared to the competition, but it was still massively successful.
Even with Nintendo Switch, it wasn’t on the same level technically as the PlayStation and Xbox. However, it did offer a new way to play as a hybrid home console and handheld system. It’s at over 150 million units sold.
Miyamoto said the following in his response (via machine translation):
“First of all, I was happy that the Switch lasted for 8 to 9 years. I think that customers are no longer just looking for specs. I think the ideal is that ‘if you buy the software, you can play it on the device you have at home.’
Smartphones are ‘everywhere,’ aren’t they? I think that’s one ideal. But Nintendo has always been ‘providing gameplay that only we can create,’ including the interface, and compared to smartphones, it has the advantage of being able to respond quickly and having a high degree of freedom because it only requires one architecture and support for one piece of hardware.
If you use a general-purpose device, you have to support all versions, so the amount of work increases. We still want to make a living with minimal effort, to live without working… that’s half a joke, of course (laughs). But we believe that reducing the amount of work as much as possible is important for making development more efficient, so considering that, I think we’ve created a pretty good environment.”
Miyamoto has shared a lot of interesting comments this one. You can check out what he had to say about remakes over here.
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