Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa has suggested the company might one day move away from home console development as technology changes.
In a recent interview with Nikkei (translated by Nintendo Everything), the recently appointed president — who replaced Tatsumi Kimishima back in June 2018 — stressed that “flexibility is just as important as ingenuity” in the business world, and that Nintendo must be able to adapt as the games industry evolves.
Speaking more broadly, he explained the company will always strive to offer people around the world “innovative and unique ways to play games,” but that might not always mean building hardware like the Nintendo Switch and Wii.
“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,” commented Furukawa.
“It has been over 30 years since we started developing consoles. Nintendo’s history goes back even further than that, and through all the struggles that they faced the only thing that they thought about was what to make next. In the long-term, perhaps our focus as a business could shift away from home consoles — flexibility is just as important as ingenuity.”
You can hear more from Furukawa by checking out the full interview over on Nintendo Everything. It’s well worth a read.