It’s time for the second quote, folks, again taken from Ask Iwata: Words of Wisdom. On the importance of Nintendo innovating, Iwata says:
‘If you maintain the status quo, you wind up fighting for survival, and gradually your fan base disappears’.
Separately, Iwata also said:
‘I am not saying that technology is unimportant. I understand that technology is important. But if we are just focusing on technology and investing in an IT manufacturing plant to come up with higher performance processing [chips], we will not succeed’.
And to show he was serious about what he believed in:
‘At Nintendo, we do not run from risk. We run to it’.
Now, of course, this is perhaps one of the hottest topics for Nintendo ‘purists’ such as this writer. Just this week, the admirable Shuhei Yoshida, formerly with Sony and a self-proclaimed Nintendo superfan himself, said he believes that ‘In a sense I think they are losing their identity’.
So, what’s the counterpoint to all this?
Well, for a start, it’s not unheard of for the company to do simple iterations with their consoles. Think NES to SNES (graphical upgrade), and N64 to GameCube (graphical upgrade, small discs). They usually follow a pattern in which the true innovation happens the following console along.
Further to that thinking (and hidden away on their own site), Nintendo all but acknowledges that the Switch 2 is a safe console, with Tetsuya Sasaki, a member of the Technology Development Division, stating:
‘Just to be clear, we’re not saying that Nintendo will never develop gaming consoles with new and unique hardware features in the future. We made that choice this time because, rather than equipping the new console with new hardware features, we thought we’d have the option to offer new gameplay experiences by packaging additional accessories together with games, just as we bundled the Ring-Con with Ring Fit Adventure’.
The truth of the matter is that we won’t really know if they’ve permanently changed until their next console, likely in 2031/32, onwards. It’ll also depend on how the Switch 2 itself sells (if it does another 150 million, they may be tempted).
Bottom line? If their next console is called the ‘Nintendo Switch 3’ and offers more power with little else, then there’s a good chance the innovation game is over, the opposite of Iwata’s prescient philosophy.
Time will tell us.
