Nintendo is willing to move away from home consoles, president says
The company should "think flexibly" despite the Switch's popularity, Shuntaro Furukawa tells the Nikkei.
Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa is prepared to dump home consoles if the market demands it.
"We aren't really fixated on our consoles," he told Nikkei, as translated by Nintendo Everything and reported Sunday by Eurogamer.
"At the moment we're offering the uniquely developed Nintendo Switch and its software -- and that's what we're basing how we deliver the 'Nintendo experience' on. That being said, technology changes," he said. "We'll continue to think flexibly about how to deliver that experience as time goes on."
Furukawa noted that through Nintendo's decades of developing consoles, it always looked to the next generation of hardware.
"In the long term, perhaps our focus as a business could shift away from home consoles -- flexibility is just as important as ingenuity," he said.
For now though, Nintendo will likely stick with them. The Switch sold more than 8.7 million units between its March 2017 launch and November 2018, and Nintendo is expected to sell 17.3 million of the consoles worldwide in 2019.
Furukawa wants to expand Nintendo's mobile games since it offers a "continuous stream of revenue." He also highlighted the "synergy" he anticipates from its theme park and movies. Super Nintendo World will open at Universal Studios Japan in 2020, and a Super Mario Bros. animated movie is scheduled for 2022. (Hopefully it'll be better than the last Mario movie.)
Nintendo's mobile games made $348 million in 2018, according to marketing analysis firm Sensor Tower. Strategy RPG Fire Emblem Heroes was its top earner, having brought in $230 million, with the September release Dragalia Lost earning around $58.4 million.
In July, a month after he assumed office, Furukawa won 96.5 percent approval from shareholders.
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