Nintendo’s legendary video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto has taken part in Q&A session following the company’s latest financial results and one thing he touched on is the ability to bring classic Nintendo games to their current system, the Nintendo Switch. Mr. Miyamoto said that with today’s development environment becoming more standardised, it is easier than ever for them to bring their back catalogue to the Switch and their future systems. However, he reiterated that the company’s true mission to is create brand new experiences for its huge user base and when they show off their next system they want to showcase new games which could not be done on the current system, the Nintendo Switch.
“In the past, we provided a service known as the ‘Virtual Console’ that allowed users to play older video games on new consoles with newer hardware. As long as the hardware remained unchanged, those games could continue to be played.”
“However, the publishing rights to video games are complicated, and we have said that we would only add titles after securing the necessary rights.”
“Of course, video games developed for dedicated consoles were created in different development environments for each console. As a result, when the hardware changed, the development environment could not necessarily be reused, and so the video games that had been released on older consoles could not be played on newer consoles without additional modification.”
“Recently, however, the development environment has increasingly become more standardised, and we now have an environment that allows players to enjoy older video games on newer consoles more easily than ever before.”
“However, Nintendo’s strength is in creating new video game experiences, so when we release new hardware in the future, we would like to showcase unique video games that could not be created with pre-existing hardware.”
Thanks to Greatsong1 for sending in the news tip!
Nintendo b like: “It’s easier than ever to bring back classic games. But we won’t. LOL!”
So why don’t they do it then? Still want to play their handhelds and Gamecube games again. If they put that on their online service I would actually pay for it.
+ChaosInvokerX
The thing is, as much as I’d love to see Gamecube games added to NSOE, I can’t see them doing it because Gamecube games are around 1GB per game. If they started dripping out Gamecube games the system memory would be chewed up very quickly even if it’s an empty drive.
Granted you could argue that MicroSD Cards are the answer to that problem, and to be fair it is, but I don’t think parents would be too happy paying for a service and then having to spend even more money to use said service. Especially after the backlash Nintendo got from needing microSD cards for some 3rd-Party games because they ended up needing extra space due to the NS’s lacking internal storage.
I think a good solution to this would be putting a GameCube collection in the eshop and you’re allowed to pick and choose what to download with a subscription, but they may decide that ports are more profitable.
They’re almost certain to go with individual ports in this case. Anbody who’s ever tried Dolphin knows how relatively easy it is to visually upgrade games from the GC/Wii era with shaders, hi-res textures and AA. Nevermind the fact that Nintendo has already done this with Wind Waker, Twilight Princess and Mario Sunshine. Memory constraints and ease of porting will likely show that this is the cheapest and most profitable method of rereleasing those games
I just hope those apps are immortalized for future consoles. The slow dripfeed is abysmal, but if it’s possibly here to stay it’s much better than the alternative of them resetting the catalog yet again.
I would imagine if that would be a cornerstone for their future hardware but Nintendo is always so eager to add some old classic games that they didn’t made back then.
I knew what this comment section would look like before reading 😂
Bring back VC!
Maybe bring people the option to buy each game individually if they don’t wish to subscribe.
I believe him, especially with the recent release of super Mario sunshine, but the only absence being paper Mario 2, I wonder when we will get that. Also I wish they would release wind water and twilight princess on switch before talking about another console, perhaps Nintendo need to just slow it down a little before getting excited about the future, sometimes their future projects don’t pay off quiet as well as they would hope 😞
What about giving consumers choice, rather than “do it our way”?
You know, if Nintendo ever give us a choice on rather which games we wanted to see added in Nintendo Switch Online system, I was thinking maybe they should add Paper Mario or maybe for the Wii games Super Mario Galaxy 2 before they even talk about the next gen system.
Yeah, it’s so easy to bring back the same NES and SNES titles over and over again. I do believe that.
As nice as all this sounds, I am just waiting for Nintendo to start re-releasing GameCube titles via Nintendo online
I’m usually pretty against defending these kinds of answers, and Miyamoto is being faux-technical in order to obscure the real reasons, but his overall point isn’t terrible despite problems with specifics.
There are two problems. If a remaster would make more money (even subtracting dev cost), why simply dump the old version onto your console? People who may have bought the more profitable remaster may end up settling with the cheaper original.
Second problem, while these investor meetings seem to have more industry savvy shareholders asking questions, I’m betting a lot more of them are compelled by his answer. Stock value is driven up by new things — even a newly-remade-old-thing — moreso than it is by saying “hey, here’s some old stuff (a lot of you already have access to by other means)!”
There is an answer to the problem, though, paired with a question nobody ever seems to ask: When will Nintendo make their own Gamepass/Netflix-for-games? If they put their old games paired with a massive catalog based on a subscription, all of the above problems are solved.
So of it’s that easy, why haven’t they thought about transferring the Wii U and 3Ds’s eshopes all into the Switch? That’s stupid right there.
This vid pretty much says it all.