Kimishima on the New 2DS XL, flexible lifecycles for hardware
This information comes from Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima, as stated during the company’s financial results briefing Q&A…
With regards to our Nintendo 3DS business, our software sales figures in the last fiscal year were boosted significantly by titles, such as Pokémon titles, which helped increase hardware sales, and led to an overall year over year growth in sales of both hardware and software. And as discussed during our presentation, high demand for Nintendo 2DS is driven by an attractive price point on top of its hardware appeal. This is what gives Nintendo 2DS the largest growth rate out of the entirety of our Nintendo 3DS business.
We are planning to launch New Nintendo 2DS XL during this fiscal year. New Nintendo 2DS XL has screens that are the same large size as the New Nintendo 3DS XL, and can play more than 1000 Nintendo 3DS titles already released, at a very desirable price point. Our expectation is that if we are able to continue to provide enjoyable software, we will always meet the needs of consumers who want to continue playing on the existing Nintendo 3DS series. To that end, we are always thinking about what kinds of software consumers are going to want, and evaluating our hardware cycles to
make sure that we are meeting that need.This means that our product lifecycles are not going to last for a set number of years, but will be flexible enough to change when required by changing consumer needs.
In general, this is the sort of thinking we want to adopt for all our hardware development. We want to have flexible hardware cycles where the launch of new hardware sets off the development of the next hardware that will respond to consumer trends.
