Nintendo’s president and representative director Tatsumi Kimishima said that Nintendo will mainly be focusing on its hardware rather than to start making its games on PC, according to a Q&A from Nintendo’s 77th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders.
“We are aware that many consumers play PC games. However, we believe that the integrated hardware-software business is the best way for us to provide the surprises and new gameplay experiences that we want to achieve,” said Kimishima when asked about the possibility of Nintendo working on PC games.
Nintendo’s focus, aside from its hardware, is their new string of mobile titles, one which includes the recently released Super Mario Run, which was downloaded over 150 million times around the world according to Kimishima. He believes that he is able to expand Nintendo to smartphone users, as opposed to using PC gaming as a way to connect to more people.
“We believe that we can further expand our core integrated hardware-software business by providing our software on smart devices and increasing the number of consumers who experience our IP,” said Kimishima.
Nintendo director and managing executive officer Shinya Takahashi mentioned that during E3, Nintendo had a lot of visitors to their booth to test out some of their newest demos (one of these demos including Super Mario Odyssey), so their focus on hardware and mobile gaming hasn’t affected their popularity in any sort of way.
“As for E3 2017 overall, Nintendo gained a lot of attention, and we received warm cheers from the participants. Your question just now was about software for gaming computers,” said Nintendo representative director and creative fellow Shigeru Miyamoto. “Indeed, in the past I have seen a number of exhibition booths at E3 where dozens of PCs lined the hall for consumers to try out network experiences.”
The bottom line is: Nintendo doesn’t have any interest in PC gaming and will continue to focus on their latest hardware (the Nintendo Switch) and mobile gaming (Super Mario Run and other upcoming mobile titles).
“However, at E3 this year, there were not many gaming PC exhibits or VR exhibits, which captured significant attention last year. I feel as if this environment allowed the attendees to see Nintendo anew as a company offering consumer-oriented dedicated video game systems,” said Miyamoto.
Nintendo’s competitors, Microsoft and Sony, in comparison are very involved in the PC gaming aspect of their hardware. Microsoft even has their own operating system, Windows 10, which enables them to simultaneously release Microsoft exclusive games for both Xbox One and PC.
Along with discussing Nintendo’s focus on its hardware and mobile gaming instead of PC gaming, Kimishima said that they were working on an Animal Crossing mobile game, which fans have been waiting for since its announcement back in 2016.
“We are planning to release an application using the characters from Animal Crossing,” said Kimishima. “The composition and size of the target audience varies based on the IP characters and game content, so we want to take what we have learned and consider all of these elements to provide a smart-device application that consumers will want to play for a long time.”
Nintendo’s decision to focus on its hardware and mobile gaming doesn’t come to as a shock, as they’ve never really seemed to be into making video games (or porting some of their most popular titles) for PC. Fans of Nintendo seem to be content, for the most part, with playing Nintendo-published video games on either the Nintendo Switch or the Nintendo 3DS, so I don’t think they will find the need to move to PC gaming in the future.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons
