During the 84th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders, Nintendo President and Representative Director Shuntaro Furukawa answered several questions about the company’s strategy. One shareholder inquired about Nintendo’s plans for generative AI, and Furukawa-san replied by recognizing the technology’s potential as well as its risks.
In the game industry, AI-like technologies have long been used — for example, to control the
movements of opponent characters — so I believe that game development and AI technology
have always had a close relationship. Generative AI, which is becoming a big topic recently, can
be used in creative ways, but we recognize that it may also raise issues with intellectual property
rights.
We have decades of know-how in creating the best gaming experiences for our players. While
we are open to utilizing technological developments, we will work to continue delivering value
that is unique to Nintendo and cannot be created by technology alone.
It does not seem like Nintendo is outright opposed to using generative AI. However, they are likely to maintain their traditional game design-centric rather than tech-centric approach to game development, which proved extremely successful with the Wii and Switch console generations.
As reported earlier, in the same shareholder Q&A, Furukawa revealed that Nintendo would strive to produce enough units of its next console to avoid a repeat of the Switch situation, where the lack of available units caused the unfortunate phenomenon known as scalping (resale at extremely high prices).
A couple of months ago, Nintendo confirmed it will announce the upcoming console within fiscal year 2025. According to rumors, the Switch 2 should be unveiled this Fall for a scheduled launch in March 2025, eight years after its predecessor. It is expected to have an NVIDIA Tegra 239 SoC featuring Ampere GPU architecture with 1280 CUDA Cores and 8 Cortex A78 Arm CPU cores with 12 GB of RAM. Game cards should use a Samsung 5th Generation V-NAND with up to 1.4 GB/S Read Speed. NVIDIA DLSS should be supported, but only Super Resolution and possibly Ray Reconstruction, leaving Frame Generation out.
