By Jamaal Ryan
Nintendo inadvertently created quite the disruption last
year when they announced that they were bowing out of doing a traditional E3
press conference. Instead of sinking millions of dollars into a bombastic press
conference that would have surely gone to waste as it would have stood up
against the Xbox One and Playstation 4’s coming out party, Nintendo decided to
settle for their choir-preaching Nintendo Direct and, to make up for that
approach’s lack in wider audience appeal, partnered up with Best Buy by demoing
their games in over 100 locations throughout the US and Canada, bringing E3
directly to the consumer.
It turned out to be an incredibly cost effective way in
pushing their game announcements to both core and less enthused audiences. While
gaming enthusiasts knew to tune into Nintendo’s E3 Direct, at least hundreds of
thousands had the opportunity to come within spitting distance of these
unreleased titles (I myself didn’t get a chance to get hands on with Nintendo’s
E3 announced games because the organization at the Best Buy that I went to was
terrible).
Cost effective, but not successful. Evidenced by the Wii U’s
catastrophic sales forecasts drops, Nintendo’s “guerrilla” E3 strategy didn’t
work, while likely Microsoft and clearly Sony had tremendous success last year
with Microsoft’s Titanfall exclusive and Sony’s wildly popular sucker punch to
the Xbox One’s $499 price tag with their announced price at $399.
That inherently resulted in Nintendo’s dramatic shift in
business approach with Iwata announcing plans to invest more R&D into the
much criticized Wii U Gamepad, a very nebulous “Quality of Life” initiative,
and a new focus on mobile development (which I have a strange feeling that this
also includes their “QoL” initiative as mobile platforms don’t necessarily
count as wearable devices).
So what about this year’s E3? Super Smash Bros. is instantly
going to draw more attention than all of their titles from last year combined.
Smash is Nintendo’s most popular franchise among the hardcore crowd (not to be
mistaken with Mario Kart as their most popular franchise across the core and
casual demographics). It lends itself perfectly to Best Buy demos, drawing
crowds of spectators and fans alike to test out their new fighter.
But even with Smash’s popularity – along with information on
Wii U’s next Zelda title and other unannounced projects – Nintendo’s
announcements at E3 could fall into the expected trajectory for the company. Almost
none of Iwata’s paradigm shifting plans would have crystalized into a
presentable form by E3, which means that we may not see “new Nintendo” in 6-7
weeks. These ideas may not begin to come to light until Directs nearing towards
the latter half of the year and 2015.
But the best answer is that I don’t know what to expect from
Nintendo this year. Nintendo has pleasantly surprised us and disappointed us
countless times over the years at E3. As far as I can see, this year is the Wii
U’s best chance in increasing its sales, and we already know that this comes in
the forms of Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. But what of the games that we don’t
know about? Will this year’s Zelda announcement be enough? Does Nintendo have
more gold-mine first party titles up their sleeves? Is strong third party
support even worth considering? Just a little over a month to go.
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