Nintendo On Video Game Streaming: “What’s Fun About It?”

In a recent interview with Polygon, Nintendo of America’s Reggie Fils-Aime said that “we don’t think streaming 30 minutes of gameplay by itself is a lot of fun…. From a consumer standpoint, what’s fun about it?” In a world where video game streaming has become wildly successful, and looks to be growing rapidly into the forseeable future, how can Nintendo afford, whether or not it’s fun, to not support such a successful feature?

As time goes on gaming becomes more and more of a sport. That doesn’t mean that the everyday, playing for fun user will consider it a serious activity, get paid, or anything of the like. However, a casual or youth baseball player still loves to watch baseball. Whether it be to see stars in action, to learn from those better than them, or any other possible reason, people watch others perform things they do themselves, only at a higher level.

There’s very little, if any, conceivable drawback to supporting video game streaming on their devices, yet the company doesn’t seem willing to budge on the topic. It’s no secret that the Wii U has struggled to perform even close to the level of the Xbox One or PlayStation 4. How can a competitive company like Nintendo afford to be so stubborn on such a silly issue such as this? They have been innovative and employed out of the box thinking in the past, but it’s clearly not working at the moment.

Allowing users to stream their gameplay would help bolster the Nintendo community, allowing people to connect with other players, learn from the best, or simply enjoy watching a humorous streamer. Hugely popular video game streaming website Twitch was recently in talks to be sold at an estimated $1 billion to Google. In other words, this is not a small market. In the end, Nintendo has to do something about their lack of performance in the market recently, and this seems like an easy fix to assist in that.