Nintendo is worth far more than it was just a month ago, entirely thanks to Pokémon Go. The company’s stock price briefly doubled, reasonably or not, and Pokémon Go has taken the world by storm. None of that should overshadow what’s coming this fall and next spring: The announcement, and then the release, of the Nintendo NX. Nintendo’s next platform is shrouded in mystery, but one thing’s safe to say: games like Pokémon Go and even Super Mario Maker are the company’s future… or at least, they need to be.
Pokémon Go And Nintendo’s Future
Nintendo went astray with the Wii U, for a variety of well-documented reasons. In terms of popular attention, Pokémon Go is its most popular and well-received release since the Wii days. Its unique gameplay has captured a huge, latent audience—the blue ocean. This was the strategy that the Wii leveraged so effectively… turning nongamers into gamers, or former gamers into gamers. Pokémon Go has done that. Super Mario Maker, released last year, tapped into a different but equally important trend—making players the creators. Super Mario Maker is the closest thing to Nintendo’s own Minecraft, and a real community has grown up around it.
Both games are fundamentally social. You can play them by yourself, but you’ll get more out of them if you interact with the community. And these are the kinds of games that prove sticky. Sure, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild will probably be awesome, but for most players it will be a solitary experience, and eventually it will end. Pokémon Go and Super Mario Maker don’t end, no more than Minecraft does. And the levels of engagement that generates can be staggering.
Nintendo’s old paradigm isn’t working. The Wii U is the company’s least successful console ever, sadly. If the Nintendo NX is more of the same, we can expect similar results. Even if it has a really strong launch lineup, with third-party games, latent skepticism—as well as interest in the PlayStation Neo and the Xbox Scorpio—will hold it back. But it supposedly has a wildly new concept, just as Pokémon Go does. We have no idea what it is; don’t bet on virtual reality. But if it captures that blue ocean audience again—and if it brings in players socially in a real, organic way—the sky’s the limit. It’s hard to say what that entails… but even though Pokémon Go wasn’t made by Nintendo, it can give us hope for the future. This is the direction the company should go.
