Chatting with traders at a recently published open question-and-answer session, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa made certainly one of his uncommon feedback about Nintendo’s subsequent console. Requested if the corporate had any particular measures in thoughts for the transition to next-generation consoles, Furukawa introduced up Nintendo Accounts.
As translated by Twitter user Genki, Furukawa mentioned: “As for the transition from Nintendo Change to the following technology machine, we wish to do as a lot as attainable as a way to easily transition our prospects, whereas using the Nintendo Account.”
This looks as if a reasonably innocuous and apparent assertion, however for Nintendo, it’s vital. Nintendo Accounts have been soft-launched in 2016, and weren’t tied right into a Nintendo {hardware} platform till the discharge of Change the next 12 months. So the transition from Change to its successor will, extremely, be the primary time Nintendo’s customers will have the ability to carry their account from one console to the following. Wii and Wii U house owners will keep in mind Nintendo’s rudimentary Nintendo Community ID system, and the ache of making an attempt to hold this id throughout consoles.
In further comments, Furukawa famous that Nintendo had beforehand wanted to rebuild the connection with its prospects with each {hardware} transition. In distinction, he mentioned there are actually over 290 million Nintendo Accounts — each from Change customers, and gamers of Nintendo’s cell video games — by which the corporate might join with its customers.
Furukawa was certainly mentioning to traders that Nintendo Accounts will make for a a lot lower-risk transition to a brand new console for Nintendo, leveraging Change’s monumental reputation — in addition to a hopefully extra seamless expertise for its followers. The significance of constructing a reference to customers that extends past the {hardware} itself was just lately underlined by Xbox boss Phil Spencer, when he lamented to Kinda Funny Games that “we misplaced the worst technology to lose within the Xbox One technology, the place everyone constructed their digital library of video games.”
It’s tempting to deduce from Furukawa’s feedback that Nintendo will enable customers to hold their digital libraries of Change video games with them onto a backwards-compatible successor, maybe of comparable design to its wildly profitable hybrid handheld. However there’s no assure of that. In any case, for instance, PlayStation Community accounts persisting from PlayStation 3 to PlayStation 4 sadly didn’t make PS3 video games playable on the later machine.
Nor did Furukawa didn’t sound in a specific hurry to launch Change’s successor, noting that the energy of Change’s {hardware} and software program gross sales in its seventh 12 months beat these of any earlier Nintendo console. “We think about that we have now entered uncharted territory,” he mentioned. The clock could also be ticking for Change, however Nintendo appears ready to attend to switch it till the final minute.