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

The company says it will use Nintendo Accounts to make for a less bumpy ride.

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 is notoriously late to the party when it comes to integrating new technologies such as cloud saves and 4K gaming, and its online accounts are particularly behind the times. Both Microsoft and Sony have had persistent cross-generational accounts since the aughts. Nintendo’s past solutions to console transitions have been messy and convoluted, as was the case when it had Wii owners jump through hoops to move games to the Wii U. It’s needed to catch up for a while. It’s good to see Nintendo is recognizing that, too.