Nintendo Might Give Up On Consoles in the Future, Says President

When Satoru Iwata tragically passed away, everyone knew that Nintendo would have to get a new president sooner or later. For a time, that person was Tatsumi Kimishima, who oversaw the release of the Switch and the expansion in the world of mobile games. But he stepped down late last year (the first Nintendo president to ever leave when the company was doing well) and was replaced by the now-current president, Shuntaro Furukawa, a man who has no experience in the world of video games and is, rather, a lifelong businessman.

So far that hasn’t been a problem, because the Switch is doing very well and Nintendo is happy to ride that success. However, in an interview with Japanese newspaper Nikkei, Furukawa insisted that Nintendo isn’t going to limit itself to video games.
 

"We aren't really fixated on our consoles… At the moment we're offering the uniquely developed Nintendo Switch and its software – and that's what we're basing how we deliver the 'Nintendo experience' on. That being said, technology changes. We’ll continue to think flexibly about how to deliver that experience as time goes on…

…In the long-term, perhaps our focus as a business could shift away from home consoles – flexibility is just as important as ingenuity,"

Before people start panicking about this new president destroying Nintendo, the company was toying with the idea of getting away from home consoles since back in 2016, when they were dabbling in making health care devices. And obviously, any gaming historian will tell you that before they were a video game company, they were making toys and playing cards.

All the same, the phrase ‘shift away’ is troubling. It might just be a quirk from the translation, but it strikes me as something to be wary of: after all, if Nintendo had given up on game consoles after the Wii U (which, if you recall, people thought was a genuine possibility), then we wouldn’t have gotten the rather glorious Switch.

Still. That’s just a hypothetical. And as long as we have the Switch, the chances of completely giving up on consoles seems slim.