Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa has a dilemma on his hands about how the company will bring across the majority of users from its ultra-popular Nintendo Switch family of systems to future Nintendo consoles. It is clearly something that the company will have to think hard about as planning continues on whatever system the Kyoto-based company is producing next for gaming fans. We learnt today that Nintendo has now shifted over 100 million Switch consoles worldwide since its launch in March 2017, and is by Furukawa’s reckoning, about halfway through the systems lifecycle. Here’s what Mr. Furukawa said translated by David Gibson:
Q: How think about the 98m versus next console?
A: Into 6th year of Switch and we are maintaining momentum, we are looking at how to expand and grow this 100m users, leading into next gen device (sounds like next device will be backward compatible!)
Well, whatever they bring to the table next, I’m still hoping the next system will be very interesting and more accurate like the Switch. The system are indeed in its middle of its lifecycle but some people are a little bored with the Switch system.
Backwards compatibility for Switch’s successor is a no-brainer for me, given how many people own the original Switch and a collection of games, it will help encourage people to make the upgrade – especially if the new system is able to inject some extra oomph into those games. Furthermore, I think the original Switch still has 2-3 years of life left in it, and I expect to see the next Mario Kart and 3D Mario (as well as Zelda of course) titles on it. It would make sense to be able to play those big hitting games also on the Switch successor! We shall see.
You could start with backward compatibility, that will definitely be selling point for me. Otherwise i won’t be in a hurry to upgrade to whatever Nintendo decides to release.
Do something more with the other IPs then just use them for Smash bros.
Call it the SWITCHU
Achievementssystem ;)
Backwards compatibility would be a nice feature, Sony finally listed to the players and added backwards compatibility for PS5. Then again Sony lost $25.6 billion, because they can’t get a certain chip to make more PlayStation 5’s. Sony doesn’t have to worry about future systems, the majority of the Sony fanbase can’t even get the current gen system.
A trophy or achievement system would definitely help, i’d definitely platinum Pokemon.