Nintendo president says company needs to keep up with streaming technology

It seems that conquering the handheld market isn’t enough for Nintendo. While the Nintendo Switch has made waves for the gaming giant, it’s now turning its attentions toward cloud gaming. 

Cloud gaming, for the uninitiated, is the idea of running a game on the cloud and piping it down to a local device via the internet. We’ve seen Microsoft, Sony, Nvidia and even Google recently taking a swing at cloud gaming recently, so Nintendo isn’t blazing a trail, but top executives at the company have recently talked about their views on the idea at Nintendo’s recent annual meeting of shareholders.

Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa, in a quote translated by Nintendo, said: 

“While we don’t expect all games to become cloud games any time soon, the technologies are definitely advancing. We see a future where cloud and streaming technologies will develop more and more as a means of delivering games to consumers. We must keep up with such changes in the environment. That being said, if these changes increase the worldwide gaming population, that will just give us more opportunities with our integrated hardware and software development approach to reach people worldwide with the unique entertainment that Nintendo can provide.”

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A crucial part here is the way that Furukawa mentioned Nintendo’s need to keep up with changes in the gaming environment, marking this out as an area in which Nintendo will definitely be conducting research into cloud services, even if they don’t pull the trigger. 

Nintendo’s director Shigeru Miyamoto, best known as the creator of Mario, Zelda and Donkey Kong, said that “cloud gaming will become more widespread in the future” although added “I have no doubt that there will continue to be games that are fun because they are running locally and not on the cloud. We believe it is important to continue to use these diverse technical environments to make unique entertainment that could only have been made by Nintendo.”

So, there we have it. Nintendo will likely look into the idea of cloud streaming, and it’s something the company want to do more with. However, don’t expect that to impact their work with the console market, as the Switch and local game experiences are still high on their agenda.

It’s for the best, the idea of trying to do some of Mario Maker 2‘s toughest jumps with any latency at all feels terrifying.