Nintendo’s CEO says its online accounts are the key to its next console transition

theverge.com:

By Wes Davis, a weekend editor who covers the latest in tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020.

At Nintendo’s 83rd annual shareholders meeting last week, president and CEO Shuntaro Furukawa said the company is hoping for a smooth transition from the Switch to its unannounced next game console, pointing to Nintendo Accounts as being key to the generational hand-off.

Nintendo has pointed to its accounts as being integral to future business in the past, as in the Nintendo Account segment of a special report it released at the end of 2021.

In response to an investor asking if the company has any specific measures in place to make the leap to a Switch successor, Furukawa pointed to the difficulty of switching customers from one console to the next, saying in the past, the company had to rebuild a relationship with its customers each time.

Furukawa noted that the more than 290 million Nintendo Accounts are cross-platform and can be used with console games as well as mobile apps. To close out his answer, he said that while moving onto the company’s yet-unannounced next-generation console, Nintendo would do its best to make the transition smooth for customers.

Nintendo released a fully-translated version of the Q&A session on June 30th (pdf) that gives an even clearer look at the question and answer:

Question:

Wii U was launched around six years after Wii, and Super Famicom was launched around seven years after Famicom. Nintendo Switch has entered its seventh year, and I gather it has come to its final phase, so can you tell us about any specific measures for transitioning to the next generation game system? 

Answer:

Regarding the transition to the next-generation