What On Earth Is Nintendo Up To?

It would be very difficult to argue that Nintendo had a good E3. It wasn’t exactly disastrous, sure – the Wii U put in a strong showing, and the 3DS seemed in good health despite the lack of games on show – but there was a general feeling that the company had completely misjudged its audience. Hours of time was spent Nintendo Land and the very familiar Super Mario Bros U whilst games like the fascinating P-100 and Game & Wario weren’t even mentioned. After the conference began with a lovely, fan-pleasing Pikmin 3 demo, Miyamoto disappeared backstage – and all the excitement seemed to retreat back there with him.

In the course of four separate press conferences, there was almost nothing from Nintendo itself that was worth getting excited about from a gamer’s point of view. There was no new Zelda, no Metroid, no Smash Bros. It’d be easy to infer from this that Nintendo just didn’t have anything to show. But then, weeks later, the company comes out with three announcements that would have gone down a storm a couple of weeks ago: the 3DS XL, details on the new Smash Bros, and an 8-Bit Summer promotion that will see beloved NES classics highlighted on the 3DS eShop. So why didn’t we see all of that at E3? What’s going on?

Nintendo made a wishy-washy statement on the matter that didn’t really explain anything (“we’re always looking for the most appropriate ways to both inform and surprise consumers”? What does that mean?). Dig into it, though, and you can find reasons for Nintendo’s behaviour that reveal how the games industry has changed, and why shows like E3 are increasingly becoming strange, anticlimactic events for those of us who grew up with gaming.

“ E3 isn’t just for us. It never was. It’s for the shareholders, the financial analysts, the executives that are more interested in where next year’s dollar might be coming from than what people are going to be playing in a few months.

There’s a bizarre disconnect between the focus of the excitement and attention surrounding E3 from the games press, and the focus of the platform holders’ conferences. We’re all getting excited about new games, eager to see what Halo 4 has to offer and guessing what surprises might be in store from favourite developers. Meanwhile, Microsoft comes out with usage statistics for TV watching on the Xbox and spends half an hour on Smartglass, Sony usually brings out the graphs (although not this year, interestingly), and Nintendo shows us trailers for Wii Fit instead of footage for a new Smash Bros. With the exception of Sony, which spent time debuting Beyond and showing off The Last Of Us, actual new games are either not mentioned at all or relegated to thirty-second trailers.

In order to explain this, you have to take into account that E3 isn’t just for us. It never was. It’s for the shareholders, the financial analysts, the executives that are more interested in where next year’s dollar might be coming from than what people are going to be playing in a few months. Nowadays, it’s also for the mainstream press that will be communicating the news to TV and newspaper audiences who don’t know what Pikmin is. To these people, Namco Bandai working on Smash Bros means nothing, whereas a 20-minute demonstration of Nintendo Land is pretty informative and Netflix is an important new revenue stream.

You don’t get this issue with the third-party publishers, incidentally. Ubisoft and EA stick firmly to games, for the most part, because that’s what their business is – they’re not engaged in the battle for the living room that Microsoft and Sony are fighting, and they don’t have to worry about how their stock price might react to a new product launch like Nintendo does. But both still found time to plug their services as well as their games – especially EA, which has willingly embraced social and mobile as part of its core business.

What Nintendo has clearly decided to do is aim big events like its E3 press conferences at the more general observer, be they Financial Times correspondent or someone who wants to know what the Wii U actually is. We saw Super Mario Bros U, a reassuringly recognisable presence, alongside a sequel to the similarly mega-successful Wii Fit and a party game that illustrates how the Wii U controller works and what you can do with it. If you’re a shareholder or financial analyst, you’re reassured by Nintendo’s clear references to previous mega-successes alongside a new product. Meanwhile, the people who are actually in the room for the press conference or watching live – us, basically – are left wondering what on earth is going on.

“ Nintendo hasn’t left behind its fans, but it has decided to open new channels of communication.

What last week’s announcements show is that Nintendo prefers to communicate with us directly, not through someone else’s event, with the Nintendo Direct broadcasts. For the past year, these have been fan service of the highest order, showing trailers, oodles of gameplay footage and really interesting developer roundtables as well as actually making new announcements. The Iwata Asks interviews are another way of talking directly to the most hardcore Nintendo players, delving deep into the games that make us tick.

Nintendo hasn’t left behind its fans, but it has decided to open new channels of communication that enable the company to make announcements on its own strictly controlled terms. This is a case of the company marching defiantly to its own tune, and refusing to have its news agenda dictated by large-scale American events. It’s difficult not to see the announcement of the 3DS XL, the 8-Bit Summer and the Smash Bros details literally weeks after E3 as a bit of a middle finger to anyone expecting big announcements at the show– and, more importantly, to E3 itself.

It’s not the first time Nintendo has done this. Back in the 90s and early 00s, Nintendo had its own Japanese trade show that ran alongside the Tokyo Games Show, Nintendo Space World. The publisher has repeatedly snubbed huge-scale events like Gamescom and TGS, refusing to take those opportunities to make announcements. It has already withdrawn from both of those events. E3 is quite possibly next.

There are obvious advantages to this approach. Nintendo gets to dominate the news rather than fight with all the other platform holders at E3 for attention, building buzz around its own video broadcasts. It can also spend more time talking about the interesting games, because there’s no strict press conference time limit to adhere to. Having Iwata talking directly to gamers lends a sense of intimacy that you can’t deliver at a press conference. And the press is essentially taken out of the picture: Nintendo is talking to journalists at the same time as it’s talking to anybody else who chooses to tune in.

“ We're not whom Nintendo is trying to impress any more.

But the disadvantage is plain to see. If you spent all your airtime at E3 basically ignoring gamers, you’re going to make them pretty angry about it. You might even end up with one of the editors of the biggest gaming site in the world saying that you messed up E3. But that's the thing: I'm not sure that we're the people Nintendo is trying to impress at E3 any more.

If you ever think Nintendo genuinely has nothing up its sleeve, you don’t know Nintendo – but we’re going to have to get used to getting our announcements in a different way. It’s already clear that Nintendo’s E3 presence wasn’t geared towards us. If you’re holding your breath for the next Zelda, Metroid or Fire Emblem rather than the next Just Dance, there’s a strong possibility that E3 is no longer the place to look.

Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games team in the UK, and only just got over that post-E3 hangover. You can follow her on Twitter and IGN.



Source : ign[dot]com