Nintendo’s strength lies in creating new gaming experiences

Many people have speculated whether Nintendo will launch successor models to maintain sales and sales, and the new models will also have backward compatibility in order to be supported by the existing Nintendo Switch game lineup, this has also been a common practice for Sony and Microsoft in recent years. According to Wccftech, Nintendo director Shigeru Miyamoto also answered related questions during the latest financial briefing.

“We used to offer a system called “Virtual Console,” which allowed people to play old software on new hardware. In comparison, video can be enjoyed for a long time as long as there is a playback environment. However, the rights for video are complicated, so Nintendo is proceeding with the project after ensuring that the rights are in place. Indeed, in the past, software development for game consoles was done in a dedicated development environment that differed for each hardware. Therefore, when the hardware changed, the development environment could not be taken over. Therefore, software released on past hardware could not be played without modification. Recently, however, the software development environment itself has gradually become more standardized, so it is generally easier to create a playback environment that allows software for past hardware to be played on new hardware than before. However, Nintendo’s strength is in creating new games. With new hardware, we would like to propose unique games that cannot be realized on existing hardware.”

According to Nintendo’s usual practice, it is not necessary to completely resist the backward compatibility of hardware. Some handheld consoles in the past have certain backward compatibility capabilities. Shigeru Miyamoto’s remarks indicate that Nintendo may also consider this aspect of the successor to the Nintendo Switch. Some analysts said that Nintendo’s next-generation game console will arrive in late 2024.