Nintendo have announced that they’re planning to focus on original game series in future
Splatoon 3. (Nintendo)
Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa has said the company will focus on original game series in future.
That’s in addition to their existing franchises, of course, but the president noted that Nintendo must continue to innovate to maintain its relevance in the increasingly competitive gaming marketplace.
Furukawa’s comments came in a Japanese interview with Nikkei, as reported by Video Game Chronicles.
“With the expansion of time spent at home, the range of ‘entertainment’ as an object of consumption is expanding,” he said.
“Games are not a necessity of life. In order for customers to choose games in their finite time, they have to be interesting. Competition is tough, and I am not optimistic.
“I myself am looking at and studying various forms of entertainment. In the future, we will focus on creating new game series as well as long-sellers such as Mario and Zelda.”
Nintendo’s core franchises, like Mario and Zelda, are always the company’s most popular titles but a handful of new IPs have seen success in recent years, such as Pikmin (2001), Wii Sports (2006) and Splatoon (2015).
Splatoon will see the third game in the series release next year, as revealed in the latest Nintendo Direct, while a Pikmin mobile game is in development.
The company’s innovation extends to hardware too, something Nintendo is always considering.
“We are constantly building up ideas for the new consoles the market is expecting, but there are some things we can’t do now due to technology and cost constraints,” said Furukawa.
In another interview with Nikkei from February, he noted that any successor to the Switch must be similarly innovative.
“In order to create a single piece of hardware, we have to do a lot of preparation several years in advance, so we are working without stopping. In the end, the deciding factor in whether or not to commercialise a product is whether it can create a new experience,” he said.
“We always say that we are in the middle of the Switch’s lifecycle, and since one piece of hardware can be used to play both stationary and portable games, we can offer a wide variety of software for this purpose…The life cycle can still be extended.”
The news follows the death of Mario (just kidding), so perhaps now there is room for a new franchise to step up to the spotlight.
