 So Nintendo has brought up their future hardware. This was a little bit unexpected, but the way they brought it up makes sense. And a lot of it I think is to ease people's minds. Everyone knows that Switch begins its seventh year as of March 4th of 2023. So as Switch starts to dip into the seventh year and you got Tears of the Kingdom and Fire Emblem Engage coming up, Pokemon here next week, a lot of people might be concerned that hey, if Nintendo drops new hardware next year, if they drop new hardware in 2024, 2025, whenever that they're just gonna be left behind. Nintendo has this habit, especially with home consoles of things being left behind, things starting anew. And the way that Nintendo talks about their next hardware makes sense because they just want people to feel confident in the money they're spending today. So at the investor's meeting, they do a Q&A session and parts of that Q&A session are starting to come out, including comments from Shigeru Miyamoto. So I wanna get to these comments as posted on videogamechronical.com and then we'll discuss it after. 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 necessary rights. Of course, video game development for dedicated consoles were created in different development environments for each console. As a result, when the hardware changed, the development environment could not necessarily be reused. And so video games that have been released on older consoles could not be played on newer consoles without additional modification. 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. Now, looking at those words on the surface, obviously, hey, look, Miyamoto and Nintendo are thinking about their next hardware and what it's gonna be and what it's gonna do and when they're gonna launch it. That much is clear. Nintendo's always working on something. We have no idea when it's coming. But what I find interesting in these remarks is about the backwards compatibility he's clearly talking about. Essentially, he's saying, look, older platforms, the hardware would change, things would be so drastic, the development environments couldn't translate over. So they had a harder time bringing older games back plus licensing agreements, right? And while NSO is a really interesting system, it sounds like all the games that are currently on NSO should be pretty much forward compatible with the next hardware because the way development environments work have been standardized. What that also means is that current Switch games should be backwards compatible with the next system. And I feel like this is really what he was keying in on in the conversation was, look, we understand it's been very hard for us to bring older games back the way people want, but moving forward, that should no longer be a problem because the development environments and the hardware standards have all been standardized and it's really easy to do that. We already sort of saw this with all the Wii U ports, but imagine that you don't have the port, there's just backwards compatibility instead. So I do think that he was really confirming without saying the exact wording because they are not gonna say that exact wording until the system is announced that the next hardware is gonna be backwards compatible. It's also notable, of course, that he said, hey, they wanna make sure whatever this future hardware is is something Nintendo couldn't do whatever they wanna do with with the current Switch. And we don't know what that means. Of course, Miyamoto's had some wild ideas for systems in the past, but obviously more power would enable Nintendo to do more things that maybe their developers currently can't do. And I know that Nintendo is considering feedback of their developers with the hardware development team as they're now in the same building. In fact, Nintendo's about to build a second building right next door to the current building. That way, they can even expand their teams even more. So Nintendo is looking into expansion, coming off a Switch and making their corporate headquarters and making their development teams and hardware teams even bigger. The way I look at this today is Nintendo is planning out their next hardware. They know what it's gonna be. They know what it's gonna do. They know when it's gonna release. They have a really good idea on everything at this point. I think Nintendo knows what this hardware is. They know when they wanna bring it. And so having questions come up where they're talking about that next hardware is important that they answer them because one of the biggest concerns as a Switch consumer is that we were going to get the reset. The reset we seemingly get on every platform. Not just the virtual console reset but not being able to play games on the next system, right? Couldn't play NES games on a SNES. Couldn't play SNES games on an N64, N64 and a GameCube. Now we could go GameCube to Wii and Wii to Wii U but it still wasn't a clean transition. Especially Wii to Wii U was definitely not clean. You had to reboot the system. It basically had a package of Wii inside. So it really wasn't the cleanest way of handling backwards compatibility. Certainly not the way that PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are handling it today with their backwards compatibility to, for PlayStation, obviously backwards to PS4 and Xbox backwards all the way back to the OG Xbox. So credit to Nintendo. They've now got a standardized way of developing games. And because of this, it's gonna make things much easier to be backwards compatible. It's also gonna make transition periods not as awkward because you don't have to relearn a whole new set of tools because those tools will work on the new stuff. Also by them talking about standardizing things, it makes me think whatever this next system is isn't gonna be a massive departure from what they're doing currently because a massive departure would mean new tools, new ways of thinking, new ways of doing things. Rather maybe it's gonna be a much more standardized thing where it's more like a Nintendo Switch 2 rather than, hey, let's rethink the entire wheel and go with something wild and crazy like a streaming sticker. I don't know. Some weird behemoth that requires virtual reality glasses all the time or something, right? Like that would be a completely different development environment. The fact that he notes development environments are standardized should give you hope on a Switch 2 or something like that. Now again, we don't have any idea when this next generation system is coming, but Nintendo's being much more forthright. Like this answer here is much more forthright about the future of Nintendo than they've ever been in the past. All they've ever said is, of course we're working on new hardware. We're always working on new hardware. We have no plans for this current fiscal year. That's basically then Nintendo's response over and over again. We're in the middle of the life cycle. Now they're kind of like, hey, we're kind of more willing to alleviate some of these concerns you might have today about spending money. And you know, because people might be like, should I buy a Switch today? Should I buy games today? Are they gonna be, can I play my games moving forward? This seems to be an answer of, confidently buy your games today. We'll somehow make it work on the next system. Now, it would be cool if we got confirmation this was digital and physical. Physical games being forwards compatible aren't the same as digital. I would like to see both be confirmed. But hey, they got plenty of time to do that when they finally decide to announce whatever this hardware is, whenever they decide to announce it. I don't know when, I still want it to be next year, but I don't know that it will be. Time will tell. Anyway folks, you guys let me know your thoughts and comments on this down in the comments below. I wanna thank Shigeru Miyamoto for being so open and thank Video Game Chronicle for providing translations of the Q&A. Catch you guys in the next video.