The gaming industry is still reacting to the biggest event happened in 2017 so far, Nintendo's Switch reveal. The console is set to launch on March 3rd, so it's hardly surprising that Nintendo of America's President Reggie Fils-Aime appeared in dozens of interviews across various publications.
Since Reggie Fils-Aime is never banal in his chats, there's always something interesting that can be gleaned. That's the case for his interview published by the Time, for instance, where he revealed that Nintendo's "secret formula" is to make smart choices and get lucky.
The marketplace is absolutely mercurial. But what I love about our company is that we create a vision, and then we go all in. When we launched the Wii, I mean again, people look back and say “100 million units, it was easy!” Believe me, I was there, and it wasn’t easy at all. We had tough conversations, internal debate, like “How are we going to do this? How are we going to bring it to life? What are we going to do?” And what I would say is that we made a lot of smart choices and we were lucky.
And that is the Nintendo history. We make smart choices, and we are oftentimes lucky. The decision to hire Mr. Miyamoto — we were lucky. The decision by Mr. Miyamoto to create Donkey Kong as a replacement to an arcade game that was failing in the marketplace was on one hand brilliant, to ask him to do it, but we were lucky that it was Donkey Kong, and that it was successful. What we are working hard to do, is to make smart choices with Nintendo Switch, and once again be fortunate that the marketplace responds in a positive way.
It's certainly an interesting take. Many said that Nintendo got lucky with the success of their Wii console; we'll have to see if that happens again with the Switch. Dave had the chance to try it last week and his impressions were mildly positive.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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