Nintendo hasn’t exactly had the most exciting record recently regarding games based on brand new intellectual properties (IPs). The only significant example in the past decade or so is Splatoon, the 2015 third-person shooter game developed by Nintendo EAD for the Wii U; the title was successful enough to warrant a sequel, which launched in July 2017 for the Switch.
Now, however, president Shuntaro Furukawa has confirmed to Nikkei (as reported by Video Games Chronicle) that Nintendo will endeavor to focus more on creating brand new game series going forward.
With the expansion of time spent at home, the range of ‘entertainment’ as an object of consumption is expanding. 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.
It is an interesting change for the company that has been known to pump out sequels for its treasure-trove of IPs, but one that apparently Furukawa-san deems important to keep up with the competition.
Nintendo is expected to release a Nintendo Switch Pro console soon, possibly this year, following strong rumors that this new revision’s Samsung 7″ 720p OLED display will enter mass production this June. The Nintendo Switch Pro will allow up to 4K resolution when docked thanks to the upscaling power of NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Super-Sampling technology, which we’ve already seen producing spectacular results on PC games.
Reports from GPU tech leakers such as Kopite7kimi even suggest that this more powerful Nintendo Switch will feature the first glimpse of NVIDIA’s next-generation ‘Ada Lovelace’ GPU architecture, which is believed to be coming to consumer GPUs next year.
