 Hey everyone, how's it going? Today we're going to talk about an interview that Shintaro Furukawa, the president, CEO of Nintendo Japan, aka all of Nintendo, said in a recent interview with Nikkei. Now the translation is being provided by Japanese Nintendo. It's a website that specifically targets bringing Japanese Nintendo news in English, so it makes it a lot easier for us to get things like this interview. Now the entire interview isn't translated, but this is just the important tidbits, and this is Shintaro Furukawa right there. We're going to read through this interview, and we're going to talk about what it means. We're talking about what it means, specifically to the future of Nintendo, and specifically maybe what it means for the future of the Switch Pro. I know that's been kind of a hot button topic to start this year, and this is like my third video in a little over a week on Switch Pro, but I want to talk about it because I feel like there is some interesting information to glean here as Shintaro Furukawa actually talks about technology, which based on what I remember and what I've done on research from what Awada has said and what Tetsumi Kimashima said, the last two presidents and CEOs of Nintendo, even though one of them was just a temporary one, they really kind of stayed away from talking about technology that much, outside of talking about the ways we play games, so things like the Wiimote or VR or AR or stuff like that, and some of that's touched upon here, but it seems to go a little bit deeper when you read into it, and the big thing to remember is Shintaro Furukawa does not really have a background in video games. He is a businessman, so his perspective and his thought processes might be different than we've gotten from other presidents. So let's just get into the interview and see what it says. So there was a part one of the translation that we're not going to go through right now, because that didn't have to do with technology in the way that traditionally we think about it, you talked about games as a life essential product and stuff, but now we're going to get into what is actually happening with the technology side from Nintendo. Nikkei says cutting edge technologies keep getting implemented through games, such as 5G and AR. Furukawa says, new technologies are getting adapted first in games in this world. After many years and months, people who play video games grow up from children to parents. And it's the result of how gaming, which was only done by children in the past, has expanded to a broader generation. Pokemon Go uses AR, it produces a social phenomenon where men and women, young and old, sally forth around towns in order to collect characters that appear here and there, games that give many people experiences that make them say, I did this for the first time, but this is so interesting. Have the power to change even people's behaviors, which is true, video games can affect your behaviors. On Nikkei says, a competition that transcends the frame of content, such as video games and music is beginning. Furukawa responds, it's not something that has just begun now. Games are not life essential, I can't stress that enough guys. Games are not life essential. But they're nice to have, aren't they? Products. So it would be strange for customers to leave them someday. That's what I had always been told about ever since I joined this company being Nintendo. I always have that sense of danger and feel like it's the fate of game and entertainment businesses. In that meaning, it's a very harsh business. There's a flood of methods to play, and the time-stealing competition revolving around consumers limited available free time is getting fiercer. Games are dealing with that competition while having to continue producing innovations from hereafter. So he's talking about how games are in a competition for your free time. There's more competition than ever for your free time, and it's a competition that's never going to end and games need to keep progressing forward in order to stay kind of ahead of the curve, because video games are right now the number one at least grossing money-wise entertainment business in the entire world, bigger than sports, bigger than just traditional TV and Netflix and stuff. It's a huge market, and to stay there, they need to keep innovating and keep making games that people want to play, basically. In the case, can games continue to stay as cradles that produce innovations? For a coward response, innovation is making something that many people thought impossible with common sense possible. It's important to always ask ourselves, is there something else impossible that we can make possible? When things we thought this gameplay is technologically impossible become possible with some sort of idea we are able to surprise people. There will be even more initiatives that transcend the frame of games that everyone has been imagining. Games that contribute to health care by moving bodies, like the Wii, and games that can actually be used to train memory power are also born. It's the result after having probed what we could to match subjects that are being played by many customers with games. If we find something that's interesting, we step into there. If we do that, sometimes innovations can be born. A lot of this is just talking about marrying, technology, and game innovative ideas together to impact people's lives in different ways and find new audiences. This is something that Nintendo has been doing for quite some time. You're really back to the NES if we're completely honest, and obviously they've been excelling at it in spades from the Wii era on forward. How do games change with technology? Furukawa goes, the most important thing when a new technology appears, new technology, is how the quality of the user's gaming experience changes. It's very important for games themselves to be interesting, new, and to be able to give surprises. Regardless of the technological environment, those who develop games first create content that they think consumers will want to obtain and play. After that, if there is a technology that is useful for that, they'll adopt it. The gaming population has a broad base. Other than that, it's also easy to spread technologies that have been accepted by games. For example, touchscreens expanded to smartphones after it was used in the Nintendo DS. Which yes, the DS actually did come out before touchscreens were popularized in smartphones. There were blackberries and stuff like that that did have a capacity of touchscreens and stuff kind of like the DS, but those weren't the popular brand of phones. Those were like the business savvy phones, so rich people phones. Funny how blackberries kind of fallen from those days when they were actually ahead of the curve with smart devices. Anyways, I find this interesting, especially this last bit here, because we don't often hear Nintendo talk about new technologies. And he's not just talking about it in the way that people play games. Obviously, you know, we can focus on the controls and the way Nintendo has changed that, but the Switch itself is more of a traditional way of controlling games. You could talk about how they do the split joycons and you could play them sideways multiplayer, and maybe that's innovative or something, but the motion controls that are offered aren't new. Putting it in, you know, a grip isn't new. And, you know, playing with something like this, you know, like a pro controller kind of thing, that's not new. And playing, you know, with twin sticks on the side, that's not really new either. Nintendo isn't really innovating right now anyways, in how we control a video game. But they are innovating and how we experience video games from being able to, and I say innovating, this isn't to say that this is Nintendo's original idea to have something that docs on your TV and comes with you. But to popularize that idea is a type of innovation. It's a type of technology to come at the right time, which matters almost more than being the first to do it, because Nintendo is not the first to try this. Many of our smartphones can actually do the same thing. But Nintendo was the one that popularized it with gaming specifically. And I think the way Nintendo did it has been mostly brilliant despite some design flaws and stuff like that, and some hiccups along the way, you know, Joycon drift. So when you see for yourself, the most important thing when a new technology appears is how the quality user's gaming experience changes, that could be anything. Because right now, Nintendo is not really on the kick of we want to offer new innovative control methods. Back when they did the Wii, you know, they talked about how controllers got too complicated. So we need to do that. Well, controllers since then, haven't gotten really more complicated, they've kind of standardized. And people have gotten used to being so standardized controls. So now that Nintendo isn't so afraid of those standardized controls. And now it comes down to innovating in other ways. And right now, for the Switch Pro and stuff like that, we got to be talking about new technology, new ways to make it better, whether it's screen technology, whether it's just processing and CPU technology, because he talks about how it's important for the game themselves to be interesting, new and be able to give surprises, regardless of what the technological environment is, those that develop games first create content, they think consumers want to obtain and play. When they look at what's being super successful on Switch, you're seeing games like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, which is a Wii U port, you're seeing games, you know, like Breath of the Wild as an example, which is again another Wii U port technically, Super Mario Odyssey, you're seeing games that are more in the traditional base, but find a way to appeal to gamers by broadening the type of games and the type of experience Nintendo offers that isn't necessarily controller dependent. And that is something we haven't seen Nintendo do in quite some time. Everything they've been making has been very dependent upon the control mechanisms, you know, even like Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, you know, they were forcing you to use the touchscreen and the stylus and, and stuff like that. And that's changing now. Now it's like, look, when some of us focusing on these, these sort of gimmicky kind of things, because that's what they really are. You haven't seen, you know, motion controls in a Zelda game, you know, kind of go from Wagle and Twilight Princess to full motion in Skyward Sword and then stop, they didn't do it anymore. You saw touchscreen with the old Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks and then it just kind of stopped. You see that those little gimmicks don't have the staying power. But what does have the staying power is creating innovative game experiences within the games themselves that people want to keep playing and want to experience. And that's made Breath of the Wild probably one of the most replayed Zelda games of all time, probably up there with Ocarina of Time with how many people like to replay that as well. And when we're talking about these new technologies, you know, you have to think back to that Digitimes report. Remember, Digitimes came out and talked about, you know, magnesium alloy, mass production, new CPU and the sources for their information kind of come from a little bit of the product production line. And it's easy to, to see why they would know that there's a new CPU while not having a lot of details about the CPU because if they have access to the production lines, that means they probably have seen the boards that are going in here and the boards probably have smaller chip sets on them. You don't have to see the chip to see a smaller chip set. And like the Tegra X1 Nintendo uses is a 20 nanometer chip, which is just ancient technology by today's standards. You have, you know, AMD and others going straight to seven nanometer, Intel's doing 10 nanometer 14 nanometer was actually standard at the time that you know, this this this 20 nanometer chip was even created back in 2015 14 nanometer was actually popular. And those are all shrinking of the dye because when you shrink the dye, it becomes more power efficient. And you can put different resistors and more power into it and faster speeds. So it's kind of weird, you know, we're making something smaller actually makes it better and faster. Whereas you would think, well, can't you make everything smaller, but I keep the chip the same size and fit more on it. No, you just make a seven nanometer chip and you just expand the note that that's what Ryzen does anyways, AMD is just like, hey, we're gonna make these seven nanometer chips and then we can just make multiple of them and then just have it go crazy on ham. I don't know that they had to go do something crazy like that for switch. But new technology is not something that's often talked about by Nintendo, at least from my recollection, if I'm wrong on this, feel free to link me to the interviews and the videos that show this because I went back and looked at gosh, I think it was over four dozen different interviews and statements by Owada and Kimashima. I didn't go go much further back than Owada, because at that point, you're getting to the really, really old days. And I don't know how much of that really applies to today. And I don't recall them talking about new technology in this way and talking about trying to create games that consumers want to obtain and play first, rather than talking about changing the way we play. It's a very different stance of changing the way we play to making games that people actually want. And I think this is very interesting and very telling that Nintendo is more focused now on a direction with things like the Switch and the Switch Pro that we haven't seen them focused on before. And that direction basically being one where they are starting to care a little bit about new technology and how games perform and how they look, which is something that we haven't seen Nintendo care about in a long time, maybe not since the GameCube days. And this isn't me saying Switch Pro, the next Switch are going to be looking at trying to match the Xbox Series X with 12-terraflops of GPU performance. Obviously, Nintendo is not looking at going head to head, but they do think they realize the importance of being at the forefront of the technological expansion and taking advantage of that with their games and convincing third parties to come to their system as well. We're not just getting games like The Witcher 3 and Mortal Combat 11, Doom Eternal and the Outer Worlds and stuff. We're not getting these big AAA-esque games coming to Switch. Heck, rumored now Red Dead Redemption 2. We're not getting these games coming to Switch because companies just feel like tossing it there. Nintendo's been talking to these companies. Nintendo knows what third party companies value. And while Nintendo is not going to be able to directly compete with these next-gen platforms or even like the Xbox One X or the PlayStation 4 Pro, they don't have to. For what Nintendo is doing, they just have to give third parties what they need to make a portable, dockable version possible. And they did that with this Switch. And now they're worried about the future. And I believe they're going to be doing that with the Switch Pro. I don't know how much better it's going to be, how much better the performance is, but just shrinking the die alone is going to open up so many more avenues for better CPU performance. So basically better APU performance on the whole. You can maybe put more RAM on the thing. There's a lot of directions they could go with this that are going to appease these third party developers and going to also appease Nintendo. Because remember, Nintendo is still making games and they very much care about it. And something like Breath of the Wild 2 could very well be like a 60 FPS game on a Switch Pro with 30 FPS on the original, taking advantage of those new technologies and caring about the user experience and making us want to obtain something specifically because of those experiences. So I don't know, maybe I'm way off base on this and reading too much into it. That's what we tend to do as analysts and as just video game fans on the whole. We tend to over read into comments made by corporate entities and stuff. But I don't know, you guys let me know what you think about this. You know, we're going to be talking about Switch Pro. I feel a ton this year along with the Xbox Series X and Series S, which I think is what they're going to call the low end system. And the PlayStation 5. Yes, the PlayStation 5 logo was unveiled to the CES. Didn't think it was really newsworthy to be completely honest. But it's the same font as it's always been. Congrats. But yeah, you guys have anything to think about this down in the comments below? I am Nate Jansen. I want to thank you for tuning in to this video. And you know what? I'm going to catch you in the next one. Oh, hey, like, subscribe. All that kind of stuff that us YouTubers are supposed to say to get more subscribers. Catch you later.