It’s well documented that the move to HD was a hard shift for Nintendo to make and resulted in delays to some of the core titles for Wii U that could have given it a better start in life. This is something Nintendo is obviously keen to avoid, and in recent investor conversations the company talked about how it’s planning to deal with this problem. Miyamoto explained:
“Our theme today is how effectively we can materialize our experiences to commercialize our products. This is something I often internally refer to as ‘spinoff software,’ but while we make use of our major game franchises, we want to support our character IP and increase the number of games we develop and release by also creating relatively smaller-scale but fun to play games. We’re making preparations to release software within a franchise so that fans of the series will not need to wait for, say, three years in order to play a new experience in that franchise.”
This strategy might be why we’re seeing titles like Captain Toad “spinning off” from games like Super Mario 3D World and giving players a way to stay in the 3D World universe in between games.
What do you think of this strategy? Share your thoughts with us in the comments!
Source: Nintendo
As long as the games are consistently good, I have no problem. I enjoy Hyrule Warriors. I’m skeptical about Capt. Toad being a full fledged retail release, but would like to be proven wrong. I’ll give it a chance.
I agree – keeping the quality of those spinoffs high is key here. If they do that then I’m more than happy to see more games coming our way!
It’s a poor substitute for the games I bought WiiU to play.
Seriously, these long gaps between games make the latter years of Gamecube seem like an oasis.
I am glad because this has been a problem for Nintendo since the N64 days. Hope they make some original IPS as well though. We need a couple of new franchises to come out of this era. One idea I saw elsewhere was, as an example, to release say a small f zero game on the eshop and just add tracks and cars to purchase as time goes on. Keeps the drought away and they can later release a full retail version whenever they create enough content.