Shigheru Miyamoto may seem like a nice old man, but he’s got some nasty things to say about his competition.
To say smartphone and tablet gaming has blown up in recent years would be the understatement of the century; Apple has made a fortune off of the iTunes store, games like Angry Birds are known the Continent over, and Candy Crush probably leaves more people broke and crying than Las Vegas at this point. All praise aside, however, it did not fulfill the doomsday scenario that market analysts everywhere predicted; the end of handheld consoles. Nintendo, against all odds, managed to sell staggering numbers (over 40 million) of 3DS units. While this isn’t anywhere close to the ridiculous potential on Facebook games and app stores, one would be hard pressed to call handheld gaming “dead”.
Miyamoto obviously doesn’t think it’s dead, otherwise he wouldn’t have, in a recent interview with Edge Magazine, called the mobile gaming industry “Pathetic”, along with many other criticisms you’ll find reprinted under Ashton Kutcher’s mouth.
“Because of the spread of [smartphones and tablets], people take games for granted now… The sort of people who, for example, might want to watch a movie. They might want to go to Disneyland. Their attitude is, ‘OK, I am the customer. You are supposed to entertain me.’ It’s kind of a passive attitude they’re taking, and to me it’s kind of a pathetic thing.”
“It’s a good thing for us, because we do not have to worry about making games something that are relevant to general people’s daily lives.”
“There are always people who really want to get deeply into a game … We want to create, and they want to experience, something unprecedented all the time. For us to meet these goals, we needed dedicated hardware that is designed to cater to the needs of these avoid gamers … That’s why I believe that Nintendo … will be sticking to these dedicated game machines.”
While some have said Miyamoto’s comments sound like those of a sore loser, I applaud him for wanting to appeal to dedicated gamers over the casual audience. Not that the casual audience isn’t just as legitimate, but Miyamoto’s focus on pleasing his own niche of the market is to be admired.