Opinion: January was a month long Nintendo Direct

There was a Nintendo Direct in January, it just took the entire month.

As soon as we rolled into 2019 the chatter began, where’s the Direct? Direct this week? There’s always been a Direct in January (there hasn’t), surely its this week, my children need this Direct to live.

Reset the clock!

We now know it didn’t happen, at least not in the traditional sense. Maybe it was deliberate, maybe some big news forced them to split it up but nearly everything that normally would have been announced in a Direct was announced – but just split out. It started with the announcement of a Yoshi’s Crafted World date and ended with a trio of patches earlier this week. The Dr. Mario and Mario Kart Tour delay news likely would have remained in the financial news.

Here’s your month-long Nintendo Direct;

• Capcom announced Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen for the Switch
• Yoshi’s Crafted World and Kirby’s Epic Yarn are dated
• Two Final Fantasy games dated 
• Super Dragon Ball Heroes: World Mission coming to the West
• January’s Nintendo Switch Online Games Revealed
• Game Freak’s Giga Wrecker Alt. coming to the Switch
• Indie Highlights “Direct” that could have been incorporated
• Wargroove dated and open for preorders
• Steamworld Quest announced
• Metroid Prime 4 development rebooted
• Piranha Plant and Smash 2.0.0
• Mario Tennis Aces 2.2.0 updates
• Splatoon 2 ver. 4.4.4 updates

The only thing missing this month is a greater plan for 2019. We’re still without dates for anything other than Yoshi (that aren’t just standard 2019). And February is looking a little dry for releases.

Yesterday Wall Street Journal journalist, Takashi Mochizuki, better known as @mochi_wsj asked Nintendo if there had a been a change in their policy of announcing things after a lot of news was released via Twitter and not a Direct. Nintendo says there hasn’t been a change as of yet.

So then, how long until the next Direct then, or can we expect more social media news drops?