Former Nintendo of America president, Reggie Fils-Aimé, has spoken on the Kinda Funny Games Gamescast about the Nintendo games which didn’t hit the mass market as he expected. Reggie singled out singled out Metroid: Other M as the game which he thought would be a “defining” moment for the long-running series. He said he was left disappointed by sales of the game which didn’t resonate with players and didn’t sell as many copies as Nintendo was expecting. Reggie said that he explained why the game didn’t reach expectations on the business side of things in a meeting with both Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto. He gave them his opinion and said that that it simply took too long to get into Metroid: Other M in a meaningful way and it simply wasn’t structured well.
“I really thought that that was going to be a defining moment for the Metroid franchise. It was giving much more of a perspective about Samus. I really thought that was going to be a killer moment in the franchise’s history, and it wasn’t. It didn’t deliver – not the business results, it really didn’t touch the player the way we hoped it would.
Interestingly, I was in a large group meeting, a strategy meeting with (Satoru) Iwata and (Shigeru) Miyamoto and the game developers, and we talked about why not. I was always the brash American. I was the one who would say what I believed was truth to try and help the business move forward. The point I made to the developers was it took too long to get into the meat and potatoes of this game. The first five hours of the game, you kind of plotted around. There wasn’t a lot of payoff, there was a lot of dialog, and I’m sure I pissed people off in the room. But the learning here was the player wants to get into this much faster. Yes, there are elements we need to do from a tutorial standpoint to help them understand the game mechanics, but you need to move things along much quicker. And hopefully that advice had a little bit of an impact on the developers in the room.”
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