The Nintendo Difference - Why It Still Matters More Than Ever After 15 Years

15 years ago at E3 2001, Satoru Iwata revealed to us what he believed were the "four legs" of Nintendo, calling it "The Nintendo Difference." They were
  1. Innovation
  2. Quality
  3. Characters
  4. Heritage
Has their company-motto or philosophy changed since that time? I believe it may have detoured a little bit. With Wii, they leaned heavily on innovation. One can argue that quality is a subjective thing, but Nintendo opted not to jump to HD, which many may think of as a component of quality during that era. The characters of Nintendo were not as prominently instrumental during the Wii-era; it was more about the experience and putting oneself into the game with Miis and immersive controls. Heritage was something they used in a bold way by introducing the Virtual Console and including Gamecube backwards-compatibility. Overall, the Wii-era heavily relied upon innovation and heritage.

15 years later, we are bracing ourselves for information on Nintendo's seventh home-console, codenamed NX, and that mantra we heard uttered during that press-conference rings truer than ever before.

Nintendo has always innovated, whether it was subtle, like the SNES controller's addition of two face-buttons and two triggers, or bold like the Wii-remote.

The quality of their greatest games on Wii U has been top-notch. Miyamoto even mentioned, during the Investor Meeting in 2015, that their games scored high on Metacritic. Nintendo of America even had an ad-campaign casually boasting about their Metacritic-scores.

It is in the third leg, characters, that we really see the true potential of what he meant back then. "amiibo" is big-business, and we just received a Star Fox anime-short, with more cross-media promotion on the way. The world likes characters, evinced by the popularity of comic-book-movies. If Nintendo can keep their characters relevant, they can keep selling games and consoles; it won't be a fad, because the Wii's success was unfortunately a fad. Relying on fads to stay in business is risky and unreliable. Nintendo has wisely decided to nurture and grow their inner fan-base, with Nintendo Directs, Nintendo Minute, Treehouse Live, and amiibo they were the first console-manufacturer to do such things. They also need to target non-fans, but not in a way that will have them interested for only one generation; they need to keep their fans. This has perhaps been their biggest weakness; many fans who grew up on NES moved on to Playstation and Xbox because their tastes changed, and Nintendo did not.

Perhaps they are subconsciously working on each leg one generation at a time. With Wii, they innovated more than in any one generation. On Wii U, the games were scored incredibly high; no one could dispute the quality of their best games. With NX, amiibo, and cross-promotional media, we are seeing their characters and IPs being promoted into the public consciousness to a degree we have not seen since the NES-era, and all the cartoons and movies we got then. Perhaps with NX2, we will see the "Heritage" leg fully unleashed.

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