Miyamoto on PS3, Industry

The Guardian Gamesblog has a talk up with Shigeru Miyamoto, where they get into his views on the PS3 delay, and the industry as a whole. From the article: "Any announcement about PS3 will affect Nintendo. But we don't see it as a competition between the two consoles, although the customers always do. It depends on what expectations people have of the PS3 and Revolution. Sony has taken a long time to create their machine but it is obvious that the direction we (Nintendo) are taking is different to the PS3."

RTFA? No need for that.

[amrust]

His views on the PS3 were basically covered in the quote.

Re:No suprise

[dpilot]

IMHO it's a matter of price. In the XBox/PS2/Gamecube generation the price separation was less, but still there. In this coming generation the price separation is widening. To buy the XBox-360/PS3, gaming has to be a higher priority in your life to justify the money. That narrows it down to harder-core gamers, which tends to mean more intense games. The market it appears that Nintendo is going after wants a bit more, the way technology always seems to deliver, but isn't willing to make it a high priority, financially.

Re:Someone care to post the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

A developer interview normally goes something like this. Turn up, chat to PR (if available, otherwise receptionist) meet head dev guy, chat about game and marvel at high level of caffeine-inspired dedication on display. But having an interview delayed because the developer is having his photo taken with the preceding journalist? Nah, never happened. Until yesterday that is, but then Shigeru Miyamoto isn't your average game creator. His mightily impressive CV - Mario, Zelda, Pikmin (hey, I liked it) - means he is revered by gamers of a certain age who grew up playing his seminal titles. My only other meeting with him was about five years ago on a roundtable discussion in Japan. The abiding memory is of a swarm of US journalists getting their copies of Ocarina of Time signed. Again, not something that normally happens in an interview. The interview was supposed to be part of the general Animal Crossing promotional push, but Miyamoto was happy to chat about far wider issues. Lovely.

Do you feel that Nintendo has been late in getting involved in online gaming?

I've been involved in looking at online gaming for a while now. We are responsible to the shareholders in the company so everything we do has to make sense financially. Until recently we have felt that we couldn't make money out of online gaming. It has been very difficult for online games to become an authentic business in this industry.

But there has to be an interesting aspect to online gaming to make it worthwhile. I am a game designer myself and what I want to do is make a variety of new games. If we have an online game I would have to spend all my time looking after one game. There are a lot of hurdles to be crossed to run an online game but we have fixed some of these, such as ease of connection and security. Now that the Nintendo wi-fi service has done so well we are ready to develop it further.

How important is it to widen the market behind gaming's core audience?

We need to widen the appeal of gaming to include more of the general public as it is hard to sustain the current audience. There is a big line separating gamers and non-gamers. We are trying to create games that excite everyone. From the hardware side we want to create an easy interface so people can say, "this I can touch". We designed the DS with this concept in mind. When we advertise the DS we never call it an advanced version of the Game Boy Advance but rather a new entertainment gadget. Our mission right now is to find subjects that will appeal to general people and create a new market.
(at this point, Miyamoto asks me what I had for dinner two nights ago. Thrown? You betcha.)
This question is how we advertise Brain Training in Japan and has helped us appeal to more people. Our research on Nintendogs has shown that many players are females in their 20s. What we are seeing is a lot of different people who never used to play games are playing on the Nintendo DS. Unfortunately we are running short of DS to sell!

Was redesign of the DS a belated recognition that how a product looks is as important as what it does? Can you explain the thinking behind the redesign?
The main aim was to make it much more portable. This is the upgraded and more gorgeous version of the DS. We have made it lighter and the screen is adjustable and brighter. Portability was the most important factor.

How different is it creating games now compared to when you started out?
When we started our mission was to create some new entertainment within the limited machinery available. Game and Watch is a good example, with a LCD screen. All you could think about were the tiny dots. Which ones can be displayed, which ones erased. So within those limitations we had to think about how we could entertain people. Today our ability to express ourselves is much bigger and wider. There are so many different functionalities we can chose from now and we can express ourselves easier. But how we are going to express ourselves is going to be more and more important to make the differenc