At its recent earnings call, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa said during the Q&A session that he believes game development will take longer, and get more complex as time goes on. Questions during the Q&A session largely revolved around the successor to the Nintendo Switch.
When asked allocation of game development resources, Furukawa said that, while there are other avenues of growth for Nintendo like mergers and acquisitions, the company would prefer developing personnel who understand the brand.
“In order to enhance the value of our IP from a long-term perspective and continue to offer unique entertainment, we will continue to aggressively secure the necessary development resources,” said Furukawa, according to a translation courtesy of X user UnstoppablePhoenix. “While there are other means of expanding development resources, such as M&A, we would like to first develop personnel who understand the Nintendo brand well within the company and who, together with the developers who have built our brand over the years, will be responsible for Nintendo’s future development.”
“In the future, game development will inevitably become longer, more complex, and more sophisticated,” Furukawa continued. “In this environment, our lifeline is to offer new and unique proposals to our customers through game development, so we will aggressively expand our development resources, including investments.”
Nintendo is currently getting ready to unveil the successor to the Nintendo Switch, and will be showing it off before March 31, 2025. The company also revealed during the earnings call that 141.32 million units of the Nintendo Switch were sold worldwide. The company is expecting even more sales for the Switch, up to 13.5 million according to recent forecasts.
In the mean time, Nintendo is continuing to release titles for the Nintendo Switch, including the upcoming Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, which is slated for a July 18 release.