During an interview with The Sankei News (translated by NintendoEverything), Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa discussed a number of topics related to both the success and future of the Nintendo Switch. Of these comments, perhaps the most notable was one related to the possibility of a successor for the Switch. As Furukawa puts it, Nintendo is “not considering a successor or a price cut at this time”. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that a hardware revision won’t eventually be announced, it appears that it could be a ways off.
One other interesting tidbit from the interview involves Nintendo’s venture into smartphone application development. When asked about plans for upcoming smartphone titles, Furukawa stated the following:
Smartphone gaming for us is not a business where we sell our consumers a product once and that’s the majority of it. Our operational model is to continue to build a relationship with our consumers. It is very different from what we do with our dedicated gaming hardware, so we are in the midst of accumulating experiences in this field. We certainly want to release games across a wide variety of genres. We want this to continue to be one means of supporting our pillars of revenue.
My Take: I think it’s important to take note of the wording used for a Switch “successor”. Depending on how you look at this, Furukawa could either be referring to a follow-up console or a simple hardware revision. It’s likely the latter, but only time will tell if this is truly the case. At the end of the day though, there are numerous pros and cons associated with the Switch receiving a new hardware revision just a few years after its initial launch. Let us know in the comments below how you feel about Nintendo’s apparent decision to maintain the status quo.
