Respected game developer Shigeru Miyamoto has participated in an extensive interview with Famitsu during which he has touched on a number of topics. When it comes to video game systems Mr. Miyamoto says that he doesn’t believe gamers are looking solely at graphical specifications these days. He said that gamers are generally much more interested in a variety of games that run on the hardware that they currently own. He points towards the original Nintendo Switch as an example of this and the fact that it lasted 8 to 9 years on the market despite its aging visuals and performance.
“First of all, I was happy that the Switch lasted for 8 to 9 years. I think that customers are no longer just looking for specs. I think the ideal is that ‘if you buy the software, you can play it on the device you have at home.’
Smartphones are ‘everywhere,’ aren’t they? I think that’s one ideal. But Nintendo has always been ‘providing gameplay that only we can create,’ including the interface, and compared to smartphones, it has the advantage of being able to respond quickly and having a high degree of freedom because it only requires one architecture and support for one piece of hardware.
If you use a general-purpose device, you have to support all versions, so the amount of work increases. We still want to make a living with minimal effort, to live without working… that’s half a joke, of course (laughs). But we believe that reducing the amount of work as much as possible is important for making development more efficient, so considering that, I think we’ve created a pretty good environment.”
I like how Nintendo always pushes out a ton of games each year, all being very unique from each other. But some publishers like Sony just publish one or two games and they are either sequels to ps4 games or remakes.
At least in the latter half of the Switch lifecycle, numerous games were having regrettable performance problems. So to a degree, specs aren’t front and center for Nintendo, not until the games start running poorly. Then the only fix is better specs, as it’s always been.
The way he phrased this makes it sound like he believes the Switch consoles are competing against smart phones rather than Xbox or PlayStation. Not that I totally disagree, but I’m curious as to why he would feel that way.