Nintendo CEO Promises More New IPs in the Future
Shuntaro Furukawa, the CEO of Nintendo, announced that the Japanese giant will be investing in new IPs more often in the future.
- CEO of Nintendo, Shuntaro Furukawa, announced that the Japanese company - in addition to developing more games from its most popular series - will begin to invest more often in new IPs;
- The head of the company also assured about the continuous work on the development of Switch and the creation of its successor, which will have to provide a unique experience.
Nintendo, like no other company in the gaming industry, is currently based on titles that are continuations of well-known and beloved series. The Japanese will not, of course, stop developing such profitable franchises as The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario and Animal Crossing, but in the future they are expected to start investing in new IPs more often - at least that's according to the company's CEO Shuntaro Furukawa.
In an interview [in Japanese] with Nikkei (paywall), the head of the company announced that in the coming years we can expect more new, original IPs signed with the Nintendo logo. Furukawa did not mention what kind of games they could be, but the change in the corporation's approach to the development of future games arouses slight optimism. I'm also waiting for the announcement of Breath of the Wild 2 you know, but the previous installment has already shown how good gameplay ideas have the Japanese. It's good that their talent will not be limited only to a few titles.
Furukawa also touched on Switch, which he believes must be constantly evolving if it is to continue to compete with Xbox and PlayStation.
"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. (...) 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. In the end, the deciding factor in whether or not to commercialize a product is whether it can create a new experience."
New games would certainly help with the latter. Nintendo has some of the most interesting franchises in the industry. The latest installments of The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario and Animal Crossing have been the talk of the East and West in recent years. They have two things in common - no release on third-party consoles, and roots that reach far back into the past.
The youngest of these series, Animal Crossing, was launched in 2001, while the beginnings of the others have to be sought in the 1980s and 1990s. Over the past two decades, we received only three new franchises from the Japanese company: Pikmin (2001), Wii Sports (2006) and Splatoon (2015). And while the ongoing fad of remasters, remakes, and reboots is a cancer in the entire industry, no other company holds on to its old IPs as tightly. That's said, we can only wait for more reports from Nintendo.
