Nintendo’s Director Hints About Their Next Console to be Backward Compatible
A couple of days ago, Nintendo released its quarterly earnings report, alongside which Nintendo also announced the formation of a new company, Nintendo Systems Co Ltd, in collaboration with the mobile gaming studio, DeNA. Furthermore, following the earnings report and other announcements, a Questions and Answers session was held to better understand the progress and financials of the company, where many Nintendo executives, including director Shigeru Miyamoto, answered some interesting questions.
When Shigeru Miyamoto was asked about Nintendo’s plans to bring old games to their newer consoles or simply he was asked about the company’s vision regarding backward compatibility of their consoles, Miyamoto stated that backward compatibility for newer consoles is a problem of the past and now with the latest standards surrounding the development environment makes it much easier to support backward compatibility.
Shigeru Miyamoto first explained the issues and challenges faced in the past for supporting backward compatibility.
In the past, we provided a service known as the ‘Virtual Console’ that allowed users to play older video games on new consoles with newer hardware, as long as the hardware remained unchanged, those games could continue to be played.
However, the publishing rights to video games are complicated, and we have said that we would only add titles after securing the necessary rights.
Of course, video games developed for dedicated consoles were created in different development environments for each console,” Miyamoto continued. “As a result, when the hardware changed, the development environment could not necessarily be reused, and so the video games that had been released on older consoles could not be played on newer consoles without additional modification.”
-Translated by VGC
Then he explained how times have changed, and supporting old games on the new hardware is much easier. Still, he doesn’t clearly state that the next Nintendo console could be backward compatible.
Recently, however, the development environment has increasingly become more standardized, and we now have an environment that allows players to enjoy older video games on newer consoles more easily than ever before.
However, Nintendo’s strength is in creating new video game experiences, so when we release new hardware in the future, we would like to showcase unique video games that could not be created with pre-existing hardware.”
Still, we can not rule out this probability completely, and Nintendo could design its next console to be backward compatible. It will be interesting to see how things work out if Nintendo plans to implement this to its latest hardware. What are your thoughts about this? Let us know in the comment section below.
