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Miyamoto on Wiimakes, Dead-End Design
GameDaily is reporting on an interview that Nintendo Dream scored with legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto. Mr. Miyamoto spoke about the future of design and Wii gaming during the interview, touching on several interesting topics. Older Gamecube titles, for example, may be remade for the Wii at some point in the future to take advantage of the console's unique control scheme. There are no announcements of which titles might see this treatment, but he seemed confident that if it does happen the pricepoint would be rather low. In some more high-level comments, Mr. Miyamoto stated that game designers have come to a dead-end as regards gaming today. Not sparing his own company, the designer thinks that future titles will have to come at gaming from a very different perspective if they are to succeed.
The Wii will probably fail. The controller is too gimmicky. The idea that there are a lot of non-gamers out there dying to play video games with a remote control.
The biggest advantage for the Wii is that the PS3 is so expensive. The Japanese will never buy a non-Japanese console, so many people will buy a Wii by default. Or they will just stick with a PS2. I expect that we'll see a lot of PS2 games released in Japan in the coming years because of slow PS3 adoption.
A lot of non-gamers who play games, play them on the PC: Flash and Java games. Think the current trend of online poker playing. That counts as a game. Solitaire is a game, it doesn't have Zelda or Mario, but it's a game.
Online hype for a console may help a console a little. Just as Snakes on a Plane was helped a little by online hype. But it won't be enough to save Nintendo.