Nintendo on Cross-Play: We Are Trying To Be A More Flexible Company

The ever stubborn Nintendo has been surprisingly consumer friendly and progressive of late- take something like cross platform play, a cause that Nintendo is championing, while the former paragon of gamer rights Sony is being an obstacle towards its realization.

Speaking about why Nintendo has decided to allow cross platform play, and about its other recent and progressive decisions, Nintendo of America’s Corporate Communications Director Charlie Scibetta told VentureBeat that the company is trying to be more flexible.

“Our publisher and developer relations team is always talking to different companies and seeing what we can work out. I’m really happy just as a gamer, let alone working for the company, that that’s going to be possible, that cross platform play. We’re trying to be more flexible as a company. We’re reaching out to try and get people to interact with our IP. In this case Rocket League is their IP on our system, but we’re trying to get people involved with us in any way we can, whether that’s on mobile now, or through Universal Studios parks, or through licensing deals like Vans,” Scibetta said.

“Once you can play the games and interact with the characters — if you’re a fan already you know it exists on our dedicated systems, but say you’re somebody in another country that doesn’t have access to those dedicated systems. You have a phone, though, and you can play that way, and all of a sudden you’re in our world. We’re trying to be more flexible and bring more people in. In the case of Rocket League, it’s just being flexible and working with them to make their game come to life on our system. If people want to play cross platform, we want to enable that.

“If it’s right for gamers, we’re going to entertain it. If we can make it work, we’re going to do it.”

It’s good to see Nintendo deciding to be less adamant on sticking to its way- it gives me great hope that Nintendo will manage to entrench itself as an indispensable part of the gaming ecosystem yet again, and that it will see more surprising games show up on the Switch.