Sony held their inaugural PlayStation Experience at the beginning of December. They opened the event with an E3 Style keynote address loaded with trailers and announcements. I was excited to watch it with my kids. We went in with a plan to make a game of it. They knew there would be trailers played that they could not see so when those trailers were on they would run to another part of the house as quickly as possible to play with LEGOs until something family friendly came on.
I was sad to find out that they spent most of the time playing LEGOs instead of sharing the experience with me. I thought it would have been more evenly divided, but it ended up being very skewed in favor of scary, M-rated content.
I want to be clear here; I am not upset with Sony for this. It was their event and they never advertised it as a family event. It was a great show on its own and I am very much looking forward to playing games like Bloodborne and Uncharted next year (after my kids go to bed). But, after all of that my biggest takeaway had nothing to do with Sony at all.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this and it left me very excited for Nintendo in 2015.
Nintendo had an amazing 2014 lineup that included a new Donkey Kong game, Mario Kart 8, and two new Super Smash Brothers games. 2015 looks like it will top all of that when they release new games for Yoshi, Kirby, Star Fox, AND Link while also introducing the world to Splatoon. Also, 2015 is the 30th anniversary of a little game you might have heard of called Super Mario Brothers. I can imagine we wont see some amazing things come out of that!
Normally, one would think that a lack of competition would be a bad thing. Right? If no one is pushing them to produce good games then the overall quality will drop. Honestly, that would be a concern for just about anyone, but Nintendo, as an organization, is obsessive with its quality. They will not release an imperfect game.
Instead, I see this as a very exciting opportunity for Nintendo to capitalize on. They have the opportunity to position themselves even more strongly as the ultimate family gaming machine. I don’t know that it will help even out the sales numbers compared to the competition, but it will go a long way to ensuring that the Wii U lifecycle continues!
