There are many ironies going on in the gaming industry right now, and one of the biggest ones is that while many major companies and publishers like Sony, Microsoft, and even Warner Bros Discovery have been making bad moves or revealing terrible news within their brands, Nintendo is over in its corner of the industry going, “Hi! We’re doing fine!” That might sound like an oversimplification of things, but it’s not. While Sony was screwing up a beloved title and Xbox was shutting down studios, Nintendo held a financial briefing where President Shuntaro Furukawa noted the many successes of the Switch and the entire Nintendo line over the last fiscal year.
He noted that the Nintendo Switch sold over 141 million units, that software sales continue to do well, even with hardware sales slowing down, and that their works in other fields, like with a certain movie in Hollywood, did incredibly. But he didn’t stop there; during the Q&A investors meeting, Shuntaro Furukawa made several notes about how The Big N was trying to grow itself by bringing in meaningful employees versus just buying up studios:
This, again, might seem like an “oversimplification,” but if you look at Nintendo over the last several years versus what’s been going on with Microsoft and Sony, you’ll see the difference in its strategies. First and foremost, if they did buy companies, it was on a much smaller scale. Sometimes they would just buy shares of a company to help ensure a collaboration instead of straight-up buying them.
Second, when you look at some of the titles the company released last year, you can find stories about how the dev teams worked together in new and innovative ways to help bring out the best of the titles. Super Mario Bros Wonder famously had newer generations of game developers come in to help look at the game in a “modern way” to see how things could be improved. The game’s success proves how that technique worked.
By helping establish the “Nintendo way,” new and old employees will understand how to build up their titles or make pitches that could help expand things even more. The success of Princess Peach Showtime highlights how The Big N is still attempting to make new franchises even with all the successes they’ve had with the “old guard.
As if that’s not enough, Furukawa also noted that they’re going to add three more women to their board of directors, further showing its growth in key areas.
