E3 2016 has been dominated by virtual reality, but it looks like Nintendo is still sitting on the side lines.
That is according to Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé, who told Bloomberg that the company will get into VR when it has mainstream potential. What does that mean? It means the VR has to represent “strong value to the consumer.” He used the example of the Wii Remote motion controller helping to make gyroscopic technology mainstream, which suggests that the company will get into VR when it can help to make it mainstream as opposed to simply offering up a VR product when it’s already proven its worth.
“We’ve been looking at the VR space since the days of the Virtual Boy,” Fils-Aimé continued. “With us, we want to make sure that our next content is going to be mainstream, mass-market, approachable, and when something like VR is at that point you can expect Nintendo to be there.”
But VR isn’t there yet; the Nintendo executive suggested that the tech was “a bit further out there” for mass-market potential. Nintendo will be looking to make full VR products that “consumers can invest a lot of time in” as opposed to “short snacks of entertainment”, which seems like a jab at some of the VR experiences that Sony announced for its PlayStation VR system at E3 this week. It might be some time before you can play the likes of Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Metroid in VR, then.
That’s a shame, especially considering reports appearing just head of E3 stating that the company had delayed its upcoming NX platform in order to implement VR support of some kind. Those reports still might have some merit, however, and we’ll know for sure when NX makes its full reveal ahead of a 2017 launch.
Until then, you can always pretend a blade in Vanishing Realms is the Master Sword, or imagine that Lucky is in fact Mario.
