Nintendo has been talking about its next gen console again and how it wants a ‘successful transition’ in terms of online accounts.
Everyone knows that the successor to the Switch must be relatively imminent, but Nintendo are not the sort of company to reveal anything before they’re ready, even when it’s their own investors asking the questions.
A recent Q&A dances around a number of questions related to the new hardware, including its release date, and tries to imply that the new console may not necessarily be released next year, as expected.
The one thing they were relatively open about though is how easy it will be to transition from the current Switch to the new one, with president Shuntaro Furukawa stating that ‘We are committed to ensuring a successful transition from Nintendo Switch to the next generation of consoles by leveraging Nintendo Accounts.’
Nintendo has always been relatively keen on backwards compatibility when it comes to disc-based software but the same has not been true of digital games, which until relatively recently were tied to the console and couldn’t easily be moved from one to the other.
For the last few years though the Nintendo Account system has meant that your games can be moved more freely, if you buy a different model of Switch, and now Nintendo is implying that the same will be true of the Switch 2.
‘In the past, hardware was the only way for us to connect with our customers, and we had to rebuild relationships with our customers when hardware became new,’ said Furukawa.
‘With Nintendo Switch, we are now able to connect directly with various customers through Nintendo Account … The number of accounts has reached over 290 million.’
There’s no official English translation yet, just a Japanese transcription, so this is all machine translated by Deepl, but the implication seems to be that you’ll immediately be able to use your existing Switch account on the Switch 2.
It’s probably wise not to assume anything beyond that, as while it’d be nice to think that the Switch 2 is backwards compatible and all your existing games will work straight away that’s not a given – and even if it does work like that, Nintendo may try to charge extra for it.
The rest of the investor questions are the usual mixture of the banal and the purely business-related (such as complaining that Nintendo raised the wages of its employees, thereby cutting into profits), but at one point someone does ask for more N64 games on Nintendo Switch Online.
They don’t get a straight answer though and neither does the person asking whether Nintendo has any interest in the Metaverse.
According to Nintendo, ‘It may not be as big as it was at one time, but many companies around the world are paying attention to it and we believe it has a lot of potential.’
‘However, for our company, it is not easy to define how we can provide our customers with specific surprises and enjoyment. It is not easy to define what kind of surprises and enjoyment we can offer to our customers in concrete terms.
‘If we can find a Nintendo-like approach that can be conveyed to many people in an easy-to-understand way, we may be able to think of something, but at the moment we consider this to be a difficult task.’
In other words, don’t expect anything soon. But hopefully we will get some concrete details on the Switch 2 by at least early next year.
Email [email protected], leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter, and sign-up to our newsletter.
Follow Metro Gaming on Twitter and email us at [email protected]
To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.
For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.
Source: Read Full Article