Miyamoto, master of cool

Of course what we are most interested to hear about are his thoughts on the WiiWare service so far. It is interesting that Miyamoto acknowledged that the American games released so far on WiiWare have been much better on the whole than the Japanese games. I think he made some good points to back up why that was the case, but you can be sure of this, no Japanese mind would come up with a concept like Beer Pong at least! Sometimes conservative is good!

Here’s what he told Wired:

Kohler: The other big news this month is the launch of WiiWare, and having gotten the chance to look at the Japanese launch titles and the U.S. ones, it seems like they couldn't be any more different. The U.S. games seem to be a lot better than the majority of Japanese WiiWare launch games. Why the big difference between the ways that the two countries are approaching development for WiiWare?

Miyamoto: I think there's a few things at play, and one is that kind of in my view, I think America has always been better at creating unique products. So I think that has something to do with it. On the other hand, I think that in Japan, oftentimes the technology required to create videogames tends to be concentrated in the bigger corporations, and the large developers have a tendency in order to try to support future development to make more conservative games and try to essentially find a way to make those games profitable and then move onto their next project from there. I think that with those two elements at play, then you can look at that and see how that could affect the lineup of both.

At the same time, even while those developers are making more conservative and smaller games, I think that it's possible -- you know, they're still focused very much on quality and still trying to make the best compact games that they can create. Whereas, I think that here in the United States where you have these independent developers who have managed to get the skills and the training and the development, also have managed to get access to the technology and the hardware needed to develop it. They're able to let their own personality and their own kind of unique interests really flourish in the games that they're creating.

Now, of course, here in the United States there's been a long culture of people independently creating things on the PC, and in Japan, I think that outside of videogame developers, while there is a group of people who do use the PC to create kind of fun, interactive pieces of art really, they haven't really come into the videogame fold or the videogame industry, so to speak. And so I think in Japan there is still kind of the possibility and even some strength out there within those more artistic communities that are creating things on the PC to potentially find some of those unique ideas. We've worked with some of them in the past from more of a media standpoint, but it's been rare that they've come into the videogame industry in total.

Kohler: Are you going to go out and try to court garage game developers in Japan?

Miyamoto: I guess, yeah, that's kind of my job.

What did you think of this, or anything else in this interview? Let us know your thoughts below.

Source: Wired