Nintendo Hints Switch’s transition to the next generation

The Switch is a huge success for Nintendo, but the company knows from its own history that the transition to the next generation needs to be thought through carefully – and you could end up in a bad way. Now people are talking about exactly this “switch transition”.

What comes after Switch? A difficult topic for Nintendo

Nintendo’s current successes almost make us forget the not-so-distant years full of major problems. The shock of the past is still deep within the company and its managers. Because in the past 20 years, successful console generations have usually been followed by a dramatic downturn, which was also due to design decisions. The most notable example: after the Wii with 101 million units sold, the Wii U disaster followed with nearly 14 million sales. A similar picture emerges for handhelds: the Nintendo DS found 154 million buyers, the successor 3DS “only” 76 million.

During a Q&A session with investors, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa now talks about this challenge in relation to a Switch successor. “Whether we will be able to smoothly transition from Nintendo Switch to the next generation of hardware is a major concern for us,” Furukawa said loudly. VGC Then he makes a clear reference to the problems of the past: “Based on our experiences with the Wii, the Nintendo DS, and other hardware, it is very clear that one of the biggest obstacles is how to smoothly move from one piece of hardware to the next one.”

Customers want Something new

And how can you build on the success of the Switch? Furukawa offers an answer to the current round of questions that turns out to be rather vague. The focus is on building “long-term relationships with customers”. Offers “outside the game software” are playing an increasing role, but the connection should also increasingly be made via the Nintendo Account.

The Nintendo president had already defined the requirements for the Switch successor more precisely at the beginning of the year: Nintendo wants to offer something new with the next console. Ultimately, the most important factor in marketing a product is whether it can provide a “new experience.” “The hardware and software development teams are in the same building, communicating closely and looking at how we can provide new forms of entertainment,” Furukawa said in an interview with Nikkei.