A portion of a Gamasutra interview with Nintendo's Damon Baker...
"The bigger difference between the launch of Wii U and the launch of Switch is that we realized with the Wii U, it was more of a quantity over quality mentality. It was more about ‘let’s get as much content out there as possible.’ We also had a bunch of experimentation going on with the [Wii U] hardware. There were a ton of really cool features with Wii U, but no one really knew which won they were supposed to latch onto, or which one they’re supposed to sink their teeth into. In the end, the defining feature was off-TV mode.
Having a corporate understanding of what it is that defines the system – what is the niche – is what it’s all about. I think this time around we had a much better understanding of what we’re trying to achieve with the Switch vs. Wii U. First and foremost that this is a console experience that you take on the go. [Also] we’ve got multiplayer baked into the box and are really emphasizing the fun of multiplayer experiences, the fun of playing games with other people. And there’s the portability – the fact that you can take this on the go. Just with those elements, even without having to explain the system itself, we can explain those pillars being important to us.
We were able to give them a running start. Right now we are being very selective about who we’re letting into the development environment, and through our portal. Whereas with the Wii U and 3DS, we opened that up to everybody. I think our mentality was to cast that big net, [but] you’d never know when the next great piece of content was coming, or where it was gonna come from, or where it was going to permeate. This time around, we’re going to be a lot more conservative. We don’t want to open up the floodgates quite yet.
We want to honor our fans by making sure we’ve got original content, that we’re forward-looking rather than backwards. That’s not to say that there aren’t ports or other great content that have come out in the past couple or few years that wouldn’t work perfect on Switch. It’s just not a priority for right now.
We’ve got limited resources on our side as well. I wish we had a team of a hundred account managers that could give every single developer and publisher the attention they deserve, but we’re lean and mean as we always have been at Nintendo. I don’t know if people have noticed as much, but we definitely have been attending all the developer conferences, all of the trade shows. We’ve been proactive in establishing relationships with developers and publishers across the board.
It hasn’t happened overnight. It’s taken the last few years to focus efforts there. And now we’re starting to see some of those relationships turn into actual products. We’ll continue to drive those relationships as well, but we’re certainly open to more content or opportunities. We’re just telling publishers and developers to reach out to us if they haven’t heard for us already. And if they’ve got a pitch for the perfect content for Nintendo Switch, we definitely want to hear about it."
from GoNintendo
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