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Nintendo talks about what to expect from the company in 2021, talks about the expansion of IP through theme parks and more
2020 is pretty much a wrap for Nintendo. We've seen everything the company has to offer this year, and now we can look forward to 2021 for a whole new round of content. What can we expect from Nintendo next year? Nintendo's Doug Bowser shared some insight in a Polygon interview.
Yeah, as we look forward, first of all, we will continue to lean into the momentum that we’re seeing from a hardware perspective in bringing more consumers into video gaming. Obviously, video gaming throughout the pandemic is becoming a very popular form of entertainment. It’s been a safe form of entertainment — whether it’s families at home playing on the couch together, whether it’s friends playing with friends online. More and more people have been introduced to video gaming, have come in through the Nintendo Switch, as an example. And we’ll continue to support those consumers through our hardware, and through our software, and through our services. And that really will be our focus as we go into 2021. As I mentioned earlier, we believe we’re at the midpoint of the life cycle on the platform. And there’s many more good things to come.
...I was going to mention as we look forward to 2021, and I almost forgot to mention it. Because we’ve been so focused on video games, let’s not forget the other ways that people have been engaging in our IP.
It’s an important part of Nintendo’s strategy: We want to share our IP with as many people around the world as possible. And it’s not all directly through our video game experiences. Some of those may be through our entertainment experiences. So I think you’ve seen, just recently, we announced with Universal Studios in Japan that we will be opening the Super Nintendo World in February of next year in Osaka. So that’s one way that we’re going to be able to really share Nintendo, in our immersive worlds and our IP, with consumers who may not be playing video games today. Or through some of our licensed activities, such as some activities we’ve done with Levi’s or with Lego or with Puma, and all those touch points allow us to expose people to the fun that is Nintendo and the smiles that Nintendo delivers. And our hope is that it brings them deeper into the integrated video game experiences that we offer.
...It’s this opportunity to create incremental touch points and introduce people around the world to Nintendo who may not be playing video games today, or may not even have access to video games today. And that can be through experiences like Universal. It can be through experiences like movies, which, we have a project we’ve announced with Illumination Studios; it can be through our mobile content; but with the goal of ultimately continuing to bring them into our dedicated games ecosystem experiences.