Speaking in an interview this week with Japanese investors, Shintaro Furukawa said the company is scared of the Nintendo Switch successor and, for this, it plans to increase its user base.
We talk about go beyond 100 million usersestablishing “long-term relationships” with them, partly through Nintendo accounts and also using other IPs outside the gaming environment.
Furukawa was answering a question, which concerned how Nintendo had been able to maintain a steady release of games over the six-year life cycle of the Nintendo Switch, and more importantly what its plans were for the transition to the next generation of hardware.
Nintendo has always supported its blockbusters such as Wii (101.6 million consoles sold), Nintendo DS (154 million), and even less popular successors among buyers such as WiiU (13.5 million) and Nintendo 3DS (75 million). ), and Furukawa said the company learned from these experiences.
We have already announced a roadmap with a list that presents part of the titles that will be released until next spring. Unlike in the past, we continue to have a great variety of titles coming out, even after five years from the release of the console.
This is because Nintendo Switch had a sensational launch, which allowed us to redirect and focus all our development resources on the latter platform.
Furukawa continues:
However, the question of whether we will be able to transition just as smoothly from the Nintendo Switch to the next generation of consoles is of concern. Based on our past experiences with Wii and Nintendo DS, it is very clear that our difficulty, at times, is just switching between hardware easily.
To minimize these risks, we are committed to building “long-term relationships” with our customers. While we are busy developing and launching new Nintendo Switch software, we will provide services that will use Nintendo Accounts and other IPs beyond gaming.
We intend to believe that this can help build a lasting relationship with our customers.
Furukawasome time ago, it seemed to have hinted that some form of backward compatibility might be includedin order to maintain and expand the Nintendo Switch audience, pushing it beyond 100 million users.
In a dialogue with investors, which took place in February, the president had talked about Nintendo’s future plans:
We currently have nearly 100 million gamers a year, so it’s very important to evaluate how we can maintain and expand that audience. It will be essential to try to keep it even when we move to the next generation of hardware.
As we well know, in fact, total sales of the Nintendo Switch were 107.6 million consoles distributedas we also indicated in our article, and officially the same company has defined the console in the middle of its life cycle.
