Can a Switch successor be third time lucky for Nintendo? | Opinion
Rob Fahey
Contributing Editor
Friday 13th May 2022
Nintendo
Good leadership is always worried about the future.
It's a fairly basic notion, but no less true for it; the role of a good leader is to be farsighted, scanning the horizon for threats and challenges, rather than comfortably resting on their laurels, no matter how well-earned they may be.
As such, it's a good thing that Nintendo president Furukawa Shuntaro says he, and the company as a whole, are very concerned about the transition to the next hardware platform -- the real problem would be if he wasn't worried, or blithely assuming that the momentum of Switch will carry Nintendo over the transition smoothly and effortlessly.
Nonetheless, we also need to acknowledge that Furukawa has good reason to be concerned. The Switch has performed magnificently, racking up almost 108 million unit sales to date -- its trajectory boosted, certainly, by raised demand during the pandemic, but still doing very well even as lockdowns and restrictions around the world eased off.
On each of the previous occasions, it has fumbled the ball badly when it came to launching a successor
It's a tremendous success for the company, but those are precisely the laurels upon which Nintendo cannot afford to be resting right now, because it's not the first time in recent decades that Nintendo has had a tremendously successful platform -- and on each of the previous occasions, it has fumbled the ball badly when it came to launching a successor.
The immense success of the DS was followed by the more lukewarm 3DS, which ultimately performed reasonably well but still struggled to notch up even half of the lifetime sales of its predecessor. Rather more dramatically, the Wii was succeeded by the Wii U,
Read more on gamesindustry.biz
