If you were to break down what you feel are the best video game creators, Nintendo would easily be at or near the top. Why? Because they have been incredibly consistent with their 1st party content since they debuted their first console forty years ago. Even when their consoles weren’t the best, you could count on their games to make your hardware purchase worth it. Given all the time that’s passed, you might feel that the top Nintendo executives would “take a beat” and enjoy their success. But President Shuntaro Furukawa isn’t one to rest while things are going well.
Nintendo Everything translated an interview with the Nintendo President. In it, Shuntaro Furukawa stated that in his mind, there’s a “harsh battle” going on to get people to buy Nintendo titles:
“We always keep in mind that if we do not keep putting out things that people truly want, they’ll get bored of us. Right now, there are various forms of entertainment besides video games. I believe that making people want to spend their precious time on video games, and Nintendo games no less, is a very harsh battle. We approach everything while resolved to the fact that at any time, people may start thinking they do not need Nintendo games anymore.”
This is not the kind of statement you would predict a gaming President saying. It’s one thing to state that you want to make great games for your customers. But it’s another to say that it’s a “harsh battle” to get customers to buy them at all.
However, if you think about it from his perspective, he knows as President that Nintendo has had many peaks and valleys over the last few gaming generations. There’s been a resulting low for every record high, and he doesn’t want that cycle to continue.
Furthermore, he’s seen in the last few years alone developers or publishers getting lax with their products and releasing subpar titles that gamers are more than happy to rip on. So if anything, Furukawa is keeping this mindset so that he and the other dev teams don’t get lax and don’t give gamers the ability to blast them.
That mindset could come in handy due to the upcoming year. By that, we refer to how most agree that the next Nintendo console is coming next year. There’s plenty of anticipation about what it might be and what games might come out for it.
Furukawa will no doubt ensure that whatever the answers are, they’re good ones that people will want to buy.
