Why Nintendo Reveals Some Games in Earlier Development Stages

Nintendo’s E3 2017 presentation gave us some tastes of several different types of Switch games with brand new trailers. Most titles — like Super Mario Odyssey, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Fire Emblem Warriors, and the untitled Kirby and Yoshi games — were set for a late 2017 or 2018 release.

A couple of outliers, however, did not get trailers or release dates. These games were Metroid Prime 4 and a “core Pokémon RPG.” Why did we hear so little about these titles? Because they’re in such early stages of development.

Nintendo

For Metroid Prime 4, we only saw a logo with the news it was “in development for Nintendo Switch.” For the Pokémon game, we didn’t even get a title. Tsunekazu Ishihara of The Pokémon Company said the game might not come out for over a year but wanted to let us know about their commitment to bringing a core title to the Switch.

IGN spoke to Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime at E3 this week about why some products are revealed close to release — and why others are revealed a ways before.

Regarding Super Mario Odyssey, Reggie said, “We could have announced it months ago, but we weren’t yet ready, the team wasn’t ready, to show it and to let the consumer really understand visually how the hat mechanic works, how the capture mechanic comes into play.”

He added Nintendo’s strategy varies by game. For long-awaited titles that will take “a decent amount of time” to develop, the company is more keen to announce them earlier on. Reggie noted fans have wanted a new Metroid game for a while now, so Nintendo was willing to share it early.

Though he didn’t mention the Pokémon Switch title, it looks like the same strategy is being applied to it. Ishihara flat out told us to not expect a release for over a year, but as a game that many were asking about, an in-development announcement is better than no announcement.

So Nintendo fans, join me in crossing your fingers in hopes that your most anticipated reveal is simply being held close for now, and they’ll announce it just a few months before its release date. Come on, Animal Crossing team…

For more details on Nintendo’s E3 presentation, check out our full rundown of their 30-minute live stream.

2 comments

Stephen Payne says:
June 18, 2017 at 4:54 pm
Look at Nintendo’s share prices after E3… I think they have different intentions, but of course, they can’t say that.
Jimmy Boy says:
June 19, 2017 at 3:01 pm
Nintendo is already developing Animal Crossing for Switch. How do I know? Because Splatoon 2 is done, set to release soon. That same team works on Animal Crossing. Plus, the game isn’t even set for release until 2018- likely worldwide given the region freedom on Switch. Why would it be Switch and not 3DS? Have you seen the new games they showed off for 3DS at E3? They were all ports of older games. Sure they’re “supporting” 3DS, but it’s low cost, easy to produce ports of existing titles, they’re not developing big AAA games like Animal Crossing, otherwise we’d have seen Splatoon, or Mario, something for the 3DS other than ports of Metroid II: Return of Samus, and Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga.