Miyamoto Not Working on Nintendo NX

Nintendo’s creator extraordinaire Shigeru Miyamoto has revealed that he is not participating in the development of the company’s next gaming console, codenamed the NX. Instead, the brains behind Mario, Donkey Kong, and The Legend of Zelda, is concentrating his energies on developing games for the new hardware.

“I’ve pulled myself back out of some of the hardware section and I’m really focused on some of the software that I’m involved in—for example, the new Starfox game,” Miyamoto revealed. “Of course I am observing and looking at the hardware, but I am not actively participating and making decisions.”

It seems that Nintendo may have learnt a valuable lesson from the subjective failure of the Wii U: the company spent so much time and effort in developing the hardware that it totally neglected the software. Poor sales of the console only picked up a couple of years after its launch with the release of titles such as Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U.

Miyamoto, however, puts the Wii U’s lack of success down to other factors, specifically the rise of tablet computing. “I feel like people never really understood the concept behind Wii U and what we were trying to do,” he said. “I think the assumption is we were trying to create a game machine and a tablet and really what we were trying to do was create a game system that gave you tablet-like functionality for controlling that system and give you two screens that would allow different people in the living room to play in different ways. […] Unfortunately, because tablets, at the time, were adding more and more functionality and becoming more and more prominent, this system and this approach didn’t mesh well with the period in which we released it.”

Thank you Fortune for providing us with this information.