Nintendo’s Doug Bowser on focusing on current-gen over next-gen, cloud-based gaming, Direct content, E3
At E3 2019, IGN spoke with new Nintendo president Doug Bowser about a variety of topics. Bowser weighed in on focusing on this generation as opposed to the next one, cloud-based gaming tech, choosing content for Nintendo Directs, and E3.
Here’s the full roundup:
On focusing on current-gen instead of a Switch successor…
“In the US, the momentum has been strong for the last five months or so. We’ve been the number one selling console. There are people that are always thinking about what’s next, but in a way, and the team we have here, we’re thinking about what we have right now. Obviously, there’s a lot of anticipated announcements that may happen here at E3 from some of the other manufacturers, but for us, we’re just entering our third year on Nintendo Switch. We’ve got considerable momentum.”
On cloud-based gaming…
“There are teams that are always looking at that next technology, that next capability. We are using the cloud, however. So if you think about Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch Online – you can save your data to the cloud and transfer that data between devices for particular games. We also have the Nintendo Entertainment System on the Nintendo Switch Online where you can pull down games from a wide variety. I know over 40 games are on that catalog. So we’re leveraging [the cloud] in different ways, but we really look at Nintendo Switch as being a great gaming device.”
On how Nintendo decides what to put in a Direct…
“Depending on how much content we have to share, we determine how we want to space it out. From time to time, depending on the franchise, depending on where we are in the readiness of the development, we may tease some things out,. We’d already talked about Animal Crossing: New Horizons coming. We wanted to make sure that fans knew when it was going to come and where we were in the development process.”
On E3…
“We don’t necessarily see E3 as a need to have a debut of something. It’s more of sharing content with consumers throughout the year so they see what’s coming and they can get excited about it. You know Nintendo well enough to know that we always have done things our own way. And for us, we have just found that type of communication cadence to be the most effective for our content that we’re bringing to market. We continue to look at the content that’s available, where it is in its development, and then we’ll schedule our communication to our fans and to players when it’s right.”
