Nintendo Accounts to 'Help Ease Transition' to the Switch Successor - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 November 2023 / 6,301 Views
Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser in an interview with Inverse was asked about the rumors and reports that Nintendo showed off the successor to the Nintendo Switch behind closed doors at Gamescom over the summer and about helping Switch owners transition to the Switch 2.
Bowser said he won't comment on the Switch 2 rumors, however, he did say the Nintendo Account will help ease the transition for players who end up buying the Switch successor.
"Well, first I can't comment — or I won't comment, I should say — on the rumors that are out there," said Bowser. "But one thing we've done with the Switch to help with that communication and transition is the formation of the Nintendo Account.
"In the past, every device we transitioned to had a whole new account system. Creating the Nintendo Account will allow us to communicate with our players if and when we make a transition to a new platform, to help ease that process or transition.
"Our goal is to minimize the dip you typically see in the last year of one cycle and the beginning of another. I can't speak to the possible features of a new platform, but the Nintendo Account is a strong basis for having that communication as we make the transition."
It was recently confirmed Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick and other executives at the company met with Nintendo executives in December 2022 to discuss the next-generation Switch.
One leaker claims Nintendo has targeted a release of September 24, 2024 for the Switch successor. There is also the possibility of an early November 2024 release for the console. It has an internal name of NG, however, a final name isn't known.
The leaker claims Nintendo will release two SKUs of the Nintendo Switch 2 with a digital model priced at $400 and a standard model priced at $449.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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The way he decided to speak about smooth transition and avoid the dip in between 2 consoles, i take this as a hint for backward compatibility.
This is common sense and would be a godsend.
I never transferred games from the family Wii to my Wii U because of the annoying process and because I was mostly done with those games.
And if there's a shared Nintendo account system, that makes backwards compatibility easier for digital games.
What I'd like this to include is transitioning Nintendo Switch Online subscription games to the next system too.
I mean I think that's obvious, and has been since they first announced NSO. No doubts about that. NSO is Nintendo's online service now. It woulda made no sense at all for them to build a whole subscription service and gradually build it out over the lifetime of the system (and those libraries probably won't even be complete by the time next gen starts anyways) and then abandon it as soon as a new system comes out lol. I expect NSO to be up and running on Switch 2 on launch day.
Like the whole reason that it sorta sucked that they slowly added all these systems and games to NSO over a bunch of years but it didn't really suck too much is because NSO was never just gonna be a Switch service, its the Nintendo service. They spent the generation building out their online service so that we can be playing all these games on NSO 5, 10, 15, etc years in the future.
This is Nintendo we're talking about, so no online services are going to be there on Day 1, lol. For whatever weird Nintendo reason, it'll be like three-to-five months before all of the current NSO games and services will be ready for Switch 2 even though it's Nintendo's own console and they've had years to have it ready.
Of course, I'd love to eat crow and see Nintendo actually get it right on Day 1 with a smooth, seamless experience that lets you transfer everything over from the get-go. But either way, there is zero chance that at the very least, the NSO retro games aren't coming over. From the Wii to Wii U/3DS and Switch, they've made us start over each time in terms of both having a library to choose from and paying for titles (outside of Switch), and they have to realize that it's not a sustainable business model, so NSO was the last time they'd expect us to patiently wait for them to start over and build a new foundation.
The interesting statement is here:
"Our goal is to minimize the dip you typically see in the last year of one cycle and the beginning of another."
Which I assume is in relation to software
