After falling short with the Wii U,Nintendohas made a strong comeback the past two years with the release of the Switch. While the hybrid home-to-handheld consolehas already surpassed the sales numbersof its predecessor and includes a lineup of masterful first-party titles, the Big N has continued to be forward thinking. That same forward thinking, however, could see a drastic change in the company’s hardware division.
In an interview with Japanese Financial Newspaper Nikkei,NintendoPresident Shuntaro Furukawa claimed it is possible Nintendo could someday end all production on home consoles. While not officially declaring how far away the industry would be from having a Nintendo-less console market, Furukawa did say if the business would benefit from doing so, Nintendo could remove themselves from hardware production entirely.
“It has been over 30 years since we started developing consoles. Nintendo’s history goes back even farther than that, and through all the struggles that they faced the only thing that they thought about was what to make next. In the long-term, perhaps our focus as a business could shift away from home consoles - flexibility is just as important as ingenuity.”
Furukawa’s statement isn’t the first time the departure of home consoles in the future has been mentioned, with the rise of streaming platforms and cloud services being a common explanation for said statements. Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillmont mentioned during E3 he believes the next generation of home consoles will be the last, as technology could advance far enough to allow AAA gaming experiences on streaming platforms.
Late last year,Google entered the gaming spaceand showed offAssassin’s Creed Odysseythrough its trial period of Project Stream, which runs through a Google Chrome browser. Even the next Xbox console is rumored to be making big changes come 2020. While it intends to release a traditional home console, Microsoft may beplanning to release a cheaper alternativewhich would allow games to be playable through a cloud service.
The idea of streaming services does look to be a viable option should companies find ways to overcome common issues with bandwidth and slower internet speeds in certain areas. Being able to releasesoftware on streaming servicescould save companies such asNintendo, Microsoft, and Sony tons of money by not having to spend millions, if not billions to mass produce new consoles.
