No Nintendo Press Conference At E3 This Year
In a financial results briefing held today the president of Nintendo, Satoru Iwata, explained that they will not be hosting a traditional press conference this year at E3.
With new venues to get information out there, like the wildly successful Nintendo Directs, Satoru Iwata believes that now is the time to change up the format. The President of Nintendo had this to say:
“We decided not to host a large-scale presentation targeted at everyone in the international audience where we announce new information as we did in the past. Instead, at the E3 show this year, we are planning to host a few smaller events that are specifically focused on our software lineup for the U.S. market. There will be one closed event for American distributors, and we will hold another closed hands-on experience event, for mainly the Western gaming media.”
He went on to explain plans outside of smaller events for distributors and the media, these based more on the fans.
“Apart from these exclusive events for visitors, we are continuing to investigate ways to deliver information about our games directly to our home audience around the time of E3. We will share more information about them once they have officially been decided. During the E3 period, we will utilize our direct communication tools, such as Nintendo Direct, to deliver information to our Japanese audience, including those who are at this financial briefing, mainly focusing on the software that we are going to launch in Japan, and we will take the same approach outside Japan for the overseas fans as well.”
It’s very interesting that Nintendo has chosen this route and it remains to be seen whether it will be successful. By taking themselves out of the commotion surrounding PlayStation and Xbox this conference it could perhaps be for the best.
What do you think about the first real E3 where Nintendo won’t have a big three conference? How will we ever live without grading all the companies with an arbitrary score, deciding who won E3?
Hit us up in the comments below, and as always you’ll be the first to hear something when we discover anything new about E3.
Charles Kheng
April 24, 2013 @ 11:07 pm
I’m not sure. It doesn’t inspire much confidence about the stuff they have lined up. That being said, Nintendo hasn’t been one to follow trends so who knows, they might still be able to impress at E3.
Christopher Deleanides
April 24, 2013 @ 11:13 pm
I still don’t know what to make of it. My initial reaction was one of concern, but maybe it is for the best. As Charles says, they’re not a company that follows trends. For them this may be just what they need, as it seems to gel with the way they operate.
Robert Strick
April 25, 2013 @ 12:16 am
Well, that’s interesting……
Daniel Flatt
April 25, 2013 @ 5:25 am
I thought about it a while, and at first it was worrying to me. However, the more I contemplate the situation the more I begin to think that perhaps these smaller showings focusing all on newer software and less on the numbers we really don’t care about, will allow Nintendo to buck some of that famous distraction from E3 and have a more solid showing.
I guess time will tell here.
Christopher Deleanides
April 25, 2013 @ 12:04 pm
Will it lead to less statistics and corporatism in general? If so then Nintendo is doing us a real favor here.
Kelsey Miller
April 25, 2013 @ 6:22 pm
^This.
At first I was worried that this was a bit of a pull-out on Nintendo’s part. But if they really put an equal amount of resources into the small showings, I think it will be better. Big conferences do get boring fast when they jump from topic to topic and never give you quite enough of what you were interested in. I think they might be less concerned with fanning their financial tail-feathers… that metaphor makes me feel weird.
Daniel Flatt
April 25, 2013 @ 6:59 pm
Within the source link it does read that they know consumers aren’t interested in sales numbers so they are sharing that sort of stuff seperately with retailers and folks like that.
Kelsey: Now I have that Shake Your Tailfeather song stuck in my head, but with CEO of Nintendo doing the dance. lmao.
Christopher Deleanides
April 25, 2013 @ 9:34 pm
Yeah, this way we won’t have to sit through long sessions of talk about the next Wii Sports iteration. We can just choose to skip those small conferences with casual games being shown off at large, and stick to the good stuff.