Miyamoto Talks Third Party Developers, Online Gaming

Nintendo general manager and legendary games designer Shigeru Miyamoto has conducted a series of interviews in the U.S. in which he has spoken frankly about third party support for the Wii, and plans to cater for online and hardcore gamers on the system. Speaking in an interview with Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal, Miyamoto was asked about how Nintendo could help third party publishers and developers ensure their titles were successful on the Wii and compete with Nintendo’s first party releases. Miyamoto answered by saying, “Partially, I think that once third parties are able to look at these examples [of new interfaces], take their great technical know-how, and combine that with some ideas that they have about how to achieve new ideas that can only be achieved on that particular piece of hardware, then I think they're going to have the chance to really see some great success..." “If there's only one piece of advice that I could give to the managers of third party companies, it would be that a lot of times it seems that when they're putting games out on Nintendo hardware, those games are being developed by their third-string team or their fourth-string team", said Miyamoto. “Maybe that's because they see those products as being unique projects or somewhat smaller-scale projects. But when Nintendo puts out a title that is designed to really support and sell its hardware, that title is always developed by one of our number one teams. And so I think that when it comes to the question of trying to compete with our software, I would really like to see the parties try to do that with their number one teams rather than with the third- or fourth-string teams.” In a separate interview with U.S. game magazine GamePro, Miyamoto was questioned about Nintendo’s traditional audience and hardcore gamers potentially feeling left out by the company’s new focus on expanding the audience for its hardware and games. Replying, Miyamoto stated that there would be “other enhancements to the Wii interface and developments being planned that are going to really make games for hardcore players a lot more fun and interesting.” “A lot of people have the misunderstanding that Nintendo is not interested in network gaming,“ he added. "What we are interested in isn't so much the idea of creating a game that is online and networked in a way that we have seen online up until now". Nintendo are still prevented from making any major new hardware or software because of the previously reported secondary stock offering and it is unknown to what exactly Miyamoto may be referring to the GamePro interview. In related news, Nintendo UK announced today that the first online Wii game in Europe would be Mario Strikers: Charged Football (aka Mario Strikers Charged), which is due to be released on May 25th. The first online title for the Wii in North America was previously announced as Pokemon Battle Revolution on June 25th, which has no confirmed released date in Europe.