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Nintendo isn’t worried about intelligent silica-based technology rivals at all

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Nintendo will be releasing a new game based on the life of Amy Winehouse. It's called WiiHab.

Gaming looks set for a shake up of sorts, over the next couple of years. If there’s one thing that the giants of the industry look keen to expand upon, it’s bringing new games to new screens, through tablet devices and smart-phones specifically.

Nintendo has just such an idea with the Wii U, while Microsoft is planning on using existing devices for their SmartGlass application. Microsoft might have a potential advantage here with that idea, something that should cause some concern within Nintendo.

Except that they aren’t worried at all.

During E3 week, Nintendo held a Q&A event for investors, with one member asking the relevant question of whether or not Nintendo should be worried about SmartGlass. Nintendo President Satoru Iwata answered that question, with the following;

The question is, is what they’re offering truly capable of doing everything that we’re offering? From what we have seen so far, it looks to us as if what they are able to offer really is only a small facet of what the Wii U is capable of.

We know that the core users who love playing video games like controllers that you hold with two hands. But what you don’t have on smartphones and tablets are the buttons and the control sticks that they prefer to use.

Now, if they could hold a controller with two hands and hold a tablet or a smartphone with another hand, there would be no issue. Unfortunately, since it is not possible for humans to do that, you can’t play a game in a way you can play with the Wii U.

It makes perfect sense, and while I don’t see SmartGlass radically changing the way we play a game, it still has some great potential in terms of how we engage with them, and what we can take away from them after we put the controller down.

And as Iwata has so correctly pointed out, over the last couple of years, various Nintendo innovations have been aped by their competitors, such as Sony with their range of Pii Move controllers.

But it’s up to the industry to find a new way to implement and make full use of that technology, because otherwise, we’re going to be neck-deep in shovelware crap again.

Last Updated: June 14, 2012

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