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Aonuma Says He Doesn’t Look At Sales When Creating New Zelda Games

Nintendo producer Eiji Aonuma has revealed that he doesn’t solely look at sales numbers when creating new installments in The Legend of Zelda series. According to Aonuma, rather than prioritizing the potential financial success of a Zelda title, Nintendo first focuses on how it can develop a compelling package that provides players with memorable and pleasurable experiences.

“I always want to create something unique, and the reason for that is not just because it makes for a more fun game experience once the game is completed,” Aonuma said. “But as a creator it also makes things more interesting for my team and myself. Images and expressions and all of those things, in order to make those unique, we don’t start with a plan that is set in stone from the beginning, it’s definitely an evolution. We may have a basic concept in the beginning, but as we are working through those concepts, they are going to evolve, they are going to change. So that’s how that particular tech demo you saw early on has evolved to what you saw in the trailer.”

93 thoughts on “Aonuma Says He Doesn’t Look At Sales When Creating New Zelda Games”

    1. Aonuma raped and murdered a pug in 1987. He was tried but never convicted on the grounds that such acts were perceived as works of art and to suppress such things would in a way be a crime against humanity…

      1. the FORTHcoming Zelda for Wii U looks beautiful.
        question for the church: do you accept girls?
        #bansasori

  1. A better analyses would have bin to say they choose different clay and work to make something out of it, then again I think he’s. Is tired of explaining him self. After all he is the sole producer of Zelda games, and that’s all he dues for Nintendo. If you think about it he knows any Zelda game he makes well sell well, I mean can we say that one of his games hasent?…..

    Also…..FIRST

  2. It’s really awesome to see people like Aonuma making games not with the interest of making the most money, but instead with the interest of making the player satisfied with their purchase. It’s getting rarer and rarer nowadays, with predictable rehashes like NBA Live, and I really respect him for doing this. It’s really why Zelda has such a loyal fan base, and that’s only because they know ever Zelda game will be a high quality, AAA game bursting with innovation and creativity (ignore CD-I games)

    1. Platinum Games.
      But this kind of developers are rare.
      When they get name for themselves, most of them, like Dice, start acting like a snobs, and/or settling for mediocrity

      1. I was thinking PlatinumGames as well, I’d also say Suda51 as well, he also makes all these interesting and niche games which usually don’t sell a ton but he keeps on making them because he has a passion for it as well as having a passionate fan base for his games as well.
        Can’t wait until he release Lily Bergamo.

      1. Nah, I really enjoyed Skyward Sword. Wasn’t a fan of how linear and closed it was but it was still fun.

        1. Tallon Ridley XIII: Kalas

          Agreed. It’s my #1 favorite Legend of Zelda game. It had more positives than it did negatives for me.

    1. Agreed. I was completely and utterly disappointed with Skyward Sword. Not a great Zelda game at all.

  3. Aonuma-San you’re a terrific developer. You are just like Miyamoto. You can count on me buying your genius work all the time.

    I can see what you mean about how things can evolve. Good speech.

    Uso!!!

        1. Well , all of us have not formally met. We also live in different locations. What I meant was that I don’t know of anyone in my surrounding area that owns a Wii u.

          1. Have you asked around?
            The people were I live (Northern Ireland) most of them have a PS4/Xbox One but most of my friends have a Wii U and/or PC/PS4

            1. I live in California, and most everyone here are Microsoft and Sony fans, so I’m the black sheep here

      1. Actually, I have 3 friends near me who own one. My brother is next, he wants one because of Mario Kart. I also have acquaintances that own one as well. I do not have that problem here.

      2. i hea people talk about their wiiu and work and school all the time, plus i have friends i personal know who own one

  4. If Nintendo was like Ubisoft etc., they would kill off the Wii U due to sales not being as good as Sony and Microsofts. And they’d probably drop the hardware business and become a software-only company, making games for both Playstation and Xbox. Simply because they might sell more copies on those consoles. Lets all be thankful that Nintendo is the way they are.

  5. Skyward sword with its linear world,unresponsive motion controls,weak water color graphics made to hide hardware limitations truly sucked the most

    Naughty Dog makes better games then all of EAD

    Infact each generation they’ve made new IP’s instead of rehashes

    PS1 Crash Bandicoot series
    PS2 Jak and Dexter series
    PS3 Uncharted series and The last of Us
    PS4 Uncharted (last game) and a new IP

    And Nintendo

    NES Zelda Mario
    SNES Zelda Mario
    N64 Zelda Mario
    Game Cube Zelda Mario
    Wii Zelda Mario
    Wii U Zelda Mario

    1. The only Game that has stayed pretty much the same has been Zelda but to say Mario games are rehashes is dumb how many different Genres does Mario have under his belt? How many Nintendo games have reinvented how you play them? Sony and Microsoft play the Safe game where Nintendo try’s to do new and interesting things all the time. People love Mario it would be dumb to make a completely new character to put into a game that Mario could easily be the main character of.

      1. Exactly the best point to be made my friend. This is what we’ve been saying for a long time. Nintendo always looks for something different that works and implements well into their games. Where have I seen Sony/Microsoft do anything different at least once? Its nothing but specs, graphics, perks and shooters to them and their dumbass drooling fandorks raving who’s got the bigger dick instead of who has the better range of fun games that’s worth the money in the long run.

        This is the grave mistake these fools are doing with PS/Xbox because they’re buying consoles and games there for the wrong reasons. That is how I see it. They wanna claim Nintendo is being kiddy or stuck in the past. That’s their loss because unlike Microsoft deciding to make changes YEARS after their own fanboys have been crying about or Sony letting huge fuck up happen like PS3 launch setback and the PSN hacking few years ago, Nintendo knows damn well about the past to refine their future and game the tradition of video gaming alive and not make it a fucking shallow way to con money by offering realism crap every fucking year.

        1. I wouldn’t say that sony or microsoft are bad, they just have their own sort of games, and looking at sales figures, many people like it that way.
          I also prefer the nintendo games but from time to time, I also like to play another type of game for playstation or xbox. Plus, you can’t blame sony, microsoft or third parties for playing it safe and not innovating since there is alot of competition nowadays (mobile gaming), and since their current games sell well, why would they change?

          I think we should respect every form of gaming instead of bashing on others.
          PS i’m a nintendo fan (not a fanboy :p )

    2. NES Zelda Mario
      SNES Star Fox F-Zero
      N64 Golden Eye Banjo Kazooie
      GameCube Pikmin Eternal Darkness
      Wii Wii Series Okami
      Wii U Nintendo Land W101

    3. Naughty Dog is talented, I’ll give them that but nobody will ever be anywhere near Nintendo’s caliber of creativity. In fact, Naughty Dog is more of a Hollywood studio for movie CGI development than video games.

    4. I’m not saying that is all they make, because it’s not, but at least with those titles they do something different.
      Remember creativity isn’t just making something completely new it’s also making something new out of something that already exists. Those Sony IPS you mentioned never for anything new with the series which is why they have to make new ones.

  6. Nintendo Commander Quadraxis

    So 5 IPs in about 20 years…

    Meanwhile our empire has created:

    Super Mario : NES,SNES,GB,GBC,N64,GBA,DS,GCN,Wii,3DS,Wii U
    Metroid : NES,SNES,GB,GBA,GCN,Wii
    Zelda : NES,SNES,GB,GBC,N64,GBA,DS,GCN,Wii,3DS,Wii U
    Kirby : NES,SNES,GB,GBC,N64,GBA,DS,GCN,Wii,3DS,Wii U
    Yoshi : SNES,N64,Wii U (Possibly others)
    Kid Icarus : NES,GBC,3DS
    F-Zero : NES,SNES,GBA,DS,N64,GCN
    Starfox : SNES,N64,DS,GCN
    Ice-Climbers : NES
    Game&Watch : G&W
    Fire Emblem : NES,SNES,GBA,DS,GCN,Wii,3DS
    Advance Wars : GBA, DS
    Luigi’s Mansion : GCN, 3DS
    Paper Mario : N64,GCN,3DS

    And others I can’t really put my fingers on but I know off:

    The Last Story
    Pandora’s Tower
    Xenoblade Chronicles
    Dillon’s Rolling Western
    Splatoon
    Toad
    Wario

    And so on…

    I think you just got more butthurt than Sasowhateverhisnameis ever was…

    1. Tallon Ridley XIII: Kalas

      The Last Story was created by Mistwalker, owned by the creator of Final Fantasy, & Pandora’s Tower was co-created by Nintendo & Ganbarion. I wish we could say Nintendo made The Last Story, though, because that game was awesome. And it would mean Nintendo had Final Fantasy’s creator working for them as a 1st party developer. Sadly, this isn’t the case. I wish I could say the same about Pandora’s Tower. It’s a great game but there is this one end game breaking glitch that Xseed or Ganbarion refuses to fix. They’re apparently using the excuse that the Wii isn’t supported by Nintendo anymore, so they don’t think they should bother to fix it. They haven’t said that, I don’t think, but they might as well say that since that glitch hasn’t been fixed at all. Thankfully, there is a way around the glitch but it’s complicated & takes a few tries to work.

  7. Nintendo is my Blood

    Okay all, this is operation: Ban The Butthurt Troll

    After all your comments I want you to end off with #BANSASORI
    The Narutard is now becoming annoying and even trolls like iceazeama, Pinwheel, JellyBean, and “you thought” knew when to just give up

    He keeps returning to bash Nintendo, Nintendo fans, women and us

    If you are for banning this little tard, feel free to email Sickr
    but adding the tag is fine as well

    #BANSASORI

    1. lol, yeah I have just been reading comments on other pages, why can’t the weird Narutard get a clue and realize there are better things to do than coming to a site about something he obviously seems to hate

      #BanSasori

      1. Nintendo Commander Quadraxis

        I love all these names…

        Xbots, Nintendrones, Sony Ponys, Sonyans (My own creation), Wiitards, Narutards etc etc…

        1. Narutard sounds better than Wiitard because if you owned a Wii, yeah it wasn’t a great console but damn did it have awesome exclusives!

          1. Tallon Ridley XIII: Kalas

            I still have Red Steel 2 from Ubisoft, Dead Space: Extraction from EA, Pandora’s Tower from Ganbarion/Xseed, & The Last Story from Mistwalker. A shame EA wants to be crybabies & that Ubisoft wants to be cheap.

    2. Nintendo Commander Quadraxis

      And the side mission: Ban the Commander haters…

      Primitive life-forms that takes games beyond seriousness…

      I miss those hairy armpits…

        1. Nintendo Commander Quadraxis

          I don’t like hashtag garbage…

          Besides, I don’t even recognise lower life-forms anyway…

    3. Valve Admiral GLaDOS

      I heard from Estoczero he was making Sasori’s ED article, we should contribute when he brings it around to us. Especially Snowman, Nintendo Commader, And Stranga, they saw all this go down from the beginning to end.

    1. Xperia Z2 is powerful because it has a 4K display and camera… it doesn’t play higher res games you dumbass ;)

      Wii U’s GPU dwarfs the GPU in the Xperia Z2 that can only run games that use the Unreal Engine 3, Wii U can run Unreal Engine 3.5 which is basically UE4 with less features but still looks way better than UE3

    2. Tallon Ridley XIII: Kalas

      The Nintendo fans stay butthurt. In fact, Xperia Z2 is more powerful than Wii U. It even has more ram than Wii U.***** Fixed that horrendous comment full of grammatical errors for you. As Damien Sandow from WWE says: You’re welcome!

  8. I like this way of thinking.

    The only Zelda game that i think was created to sell a lot of copies was Twilight princess, it is just so joyless that i can´t imagine working on it being fun.

    Give us fresh experience but get rid of the flaws of most recent 3D Zelda titles(hand holding, empty overworld, fetch quest, nothing to spend rupies on etc)

    Zelda is set in a fairy land with elves, gorons, hylians, bird people, spirits, magic, picoris, zoras, dimension jumping, time traveling, diffirent realsm and pretty much everything you can think of.
    There is no reason for his series to go stagnant

    1. Tallon Ridley XIII: Kalas

      Twilight Princess was a good Zelda game but it wasn’t the best. Bland colors, “realistic” graphics, huge fields with barely any life, little character development for Princess Zelda, Zant went from menacing villain to inferior lackey, Ganondorf felt like he was thrown in during the post development which caused a delay as they went back into development, the Fused Shadow having the power to possibly corrupt Link got thrown to the wayside, unsatisfying conclusion to Ilia’s problem, subquests with little reward to them. I’m going to stop now before I go into nitpicking territory. xD

  9. I loved skyward sword and honestly hated twilight princess it was boring to me tbh. I hope this next Zelda delivers on the open world part now that they changed to a more cell shaded art style. Wonder why that was I would have loved to see Zelda the way they showed it in the previous trailers. Maybe it was just too much to make a huge open world out of. Regardless, I don’t mind the new style it looks great

  10. His words are true. This is exactly the kind of vison most of the gaming industry has forgotten and lost or tossed away years ago and why I personally feel that gaming is dying by the hands of the selfish over specs dick measuring contest and shallow realism and shooting games Microsoft started which is why Xbox deserves to go so Sony would have nothing to go copycat over with their console and return to making PS what made PS huge in the first place instead of literally taking notes from the competition because they fear they have no creativity left.

    I never have any doubt for Nintendo when it comes to creativity and innovation. They’re alway looking for something different to do unlike the other two too busy at making each other and their fans rave and even kill each other over this petty graphics debating. Its pathetic how much gaming has degraded itself over the years and Nintendo seems to be the only true few companies left who haven’t forgotten what gaming is about.

  11. I really admire this guy… It’s just me or he has aged quite fast? I remember some interviews while he was making Twilight Princess, he looked very young, now he looks very mature and wise. Let’s hope for the best

  12. Good, make a game as best as you can and see what happens. If people care so freaking much on sales they wont want to change anything otherwise it might not sell as much look a COD…

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