Nintendo carefully considers a lot of factors before it makes an announcement. While some major products like the Switch itself have a short turnaround between reveal and release, others like the recently-unveiled Metroid Prime 4 make sense to announce earlier in the development cycle.

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“ It literally is game by game, title by title, how we make that decision.

IGN spoke to Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime at E3 this week about holding news versus sharing it, and why some games can be shown earlier than others.“You know, for us, we believe that having hands-on opportunity married to an announcement is really the best way to do it,” Fils-Aime told IGN. “And so let’s take Super Mario Odyssey for example. We could have announced it months ago, but we weren’t yet ready, the team wasn’t ready, to show it and to let the consumer really understand visually how the hat mechanic works, how the capture mechanic comes into play. And so that’s how we think these through.”Nintendo recognizes that demand varies by game, and wants to make sure that when it comes to the most requested titles, fans are assured that their excitement isn’t unheard. Metroid Prime 4 -- also, given that it’s a franchise that we know people have been very eager to get some news -- that’s when, fine, we’ll share it. We’ll share it early,” Fils-Aime added. “Others, we want to hold closer in and reveal it when the gameplay is going to be available. It literally is game by game, title by title, how we make that decision.”Metroid Prime 4 will be released "beyond 2017" and is being developed by a new team under the supervision of longtime producer Kensuke Tanabe.For more from our interview with Fils-Aime, be sure to read his thoughts on getting more third-party games , the possible future of Virtual Console , and ramping up Switch production

Andrew is IGN’s executive editor of news and really does hope Mother 3 to comes to the West soon. You can find him rambling about Persona and cute animals on Twitter