We haven’t seen the last of Nintendo’s E3 press conferences after all.
“Next year and what we do at E3 next year is going to be an ongoing conversation,” says Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime in an interview, “based on what the right thing to do is for the content we have. What we are not saying as a result of this year is that the Nintendo press conference is dead.”
The decision to do a Nintendo Direct-only approach for this year comes from wanting to put the games into the hands of the attendees as opposed to just showing it to them.
“This year, we have a parade of content that once you get your hands on it, you say to yourself I gotta get this game and I mean think about it. We have all of these playable games on our floor and most of them are coming out this holiday season, three are coming in 2014.”
This mantra of putting the games into the hands of gamers has been Nintendo’s strategy throughout this year’s E3. They have done this in the past when the 3DS was first unveiled as well. This year they’ve gone as far as creating E3 demo stations in select Best Buys across the country.
The issue of waning third party support was brought up as well. Fils-Aime empathizes with their hesitance.
“We talk to EA all the time, we talk to all of our publishing partners all the time. In the end this is a simple business. First party needs to drive a large diverse install base for publisher to create content to take advantage of that install base. That is what we are looking to do, you know for any publisher what they want to say to themselves is that we have game X and we are confident that we can sell game X not only to pay off the investment but to make a profit on that game.”
