According to comments made by Furukawa during Nintendo’s recent shareholder Q&A, the plan is to utilise the existing Nintendo Account system to make the jump to the next generation as smooth as possible for customers. Here’s part of what Nintendo’s president had to say, courtesy of a translation by Twitter user Genki:
Shuntaro Furukawa: “As for the transition from Nintendo Switch to the next generation machine, we want to do as much as possible in order to smoothly transition our customers, while utilizing the Nintendo Account.”
All nintendo has to do is make a higher resolution OLED display, a bigger battery, and a modern day chip. Heck, they can even go Snapdragon.
More memory storage would be great too, especially if the trend towards digital only distribution continues. I’d prefer continued commitment to physical media, but now publishers are even pushing it more towards the disk/SD card basically just holding DRM for a game you still have to download, not to mention DLC and updates. I don’t even have a particularly large Switch library but my 128 GB SD card is filling up fast.
I am digital only, and my 200GB filled up fast. The only silver lining is, since Switch doesn’t support 4K, the size of games is smaller, so it can still have lots of games installed.
That’s what we want, but it’s Nintendo, they are going to do some “nintendo magic” with it. So, I am only hoping they don’t change the basic things.
Nintendo invested quite a bit in their NVN api from Nvidia so I would imagine they would like to keep that going for at least another cycle. It would also help with ensuring developers are still comfortable developing the system for potentially both the new and older models.