Nintendo's iconic designer Shigeru Miyamoto spoke with EuroGamer about his thoughts on consumer rights in next-gen consoles and said that the company will stick to a more traditional approach of allowing gamers to remain the property owner of the games "for a long time," once purchased, like a physical toy.
"What's really important is viewing Nintendo almost like a toy company where we're making these things for people to play with," said Miyamoto. "As a consumer you want to be able to keep those things for a long time and have those things from your youth that you can go back to and experience again."
This comes as Microsoft is going for a license-based structure for Xbox One games to combat used games and piracy through an always-connected policy (including a "check in" every 24 hours) which have caused many gamers to cringe. Microsoft's strong stance is what many feel led to its embarrassing defeat against Sony during this week's E3. Sony announced during its pre-E3 press briefing that the Playstation 4 won't have an always-on and gamers will be able to play used games without restraint.
Regie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of American president, told Polygon that the best way developers could counter used games was to make better ones.
"Certainly, that [used games] impacts games that are annualized and candidly also impacts games that are maybe undifferentiated much more that [it] impacts Nintendo content," said Felis-Aime. "Why is that? Because the replay-ability of our content is super strong."
Fils-Aime continued that consumers of Nintendo products still continue to play titles like Mario Kart, New Super Mario Bros and Pikmin.
"We see that the trade-in frequency on Nintendo content is much less than the industry average - much, much less," Felis-Aime said. " So for us, we have been able to step back and say that we are not taking any technological means to impact trade-in and we are confident that if we build great content, then the consumer will not want to trade in our games."
