More Controversial Commentary from Nintendo President

Following on the heels of his incindiary comments regarding Squaresoft and Microsoft’s Xbox, Nintendo company president Hiroshi Yamauchi has expressed more harsh criticism in an interview with Japanese magazine Zaikai. Among his comments, Yamauchi expressed his belief that a major industry shakeout will occur within the next year. He stated that the console video game industry could stand to be reduced to a 10th of its current size because the industry is full of venture capitalists and developers that know nothing about video games. Furthermore, the trend in gaming is moving toward multi-player compatible games largely because the majority of developers in the current industry can’t come up with any new or original ideas on their own. On the state of video games themselves, Yamauchi stated that games should be about gameplay. Contemporary gamers have a very short attention span, so CG movie sequences and flashy graphics do little other than raise the cost of developing games. As an example, he cited Dragon Quest 7, which relies heavily on out-dated 2D graphics but has outsold all of its competitors. Yamauchi said of the Playstation 2 that the system is a worthwhile product for its DVD player capability, but is not a successful console video game system because it’s too difficult and costly to program game software for.

Source: The Magic Box