Shigeru Miyamoto confirmed that Pikmin 4 is in development during a recent shareholders Q&A session. In answering a question about development costs, the famed developer began to discuss the recently released Pikmin short films he created as well as the demo version and downloadable content for Pikmin 3. Miyamoto said that all of this bonus content is meant to be a way to prepare consumers for a planned Pikmin 4:

If I am allowed to do a little bit of PR here, we released a series of short films called Pikmin Short Movies on October 25 at the Tokyo International Film Festival. […] At the same time, we have also prepared a demo version of Pikmin 3 so anyone who hasn’t played Pikmin can experience its unique joy. Continually launching campaigns after the release of software will lay the groundwork for the next iteration of Pikmin in the future. And needless to say, we want it to be one of the motivations for potential consumers to purchase Wii U.

Because of the Wii-to-Wii U transition, Pikmin 3 took five years to go from announcement to release. Hopefully, launching Pikmin 4 on the Wii U means that the fourth entry in the franchise won’t spend so long in development.