Furukawa talks Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ impact on Nintendo, Switch production amid semiconductor shortage

2020 was a strong year for Nintendo thanks to high Switch demand and the phenomenal performance of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It’s been widely reported that the title has shipped over 30 million copies worldwide.

Nikkei recently spoke with Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa, and the Japanese publication brought up how games like Animal Crossing help encourage people to stay home more in the current climate. That led Furukawa to note: “As games with long lifespans like Animal Crossing become more accepted, we believe this will have a significant impact on future development.” Additionally mentioned is that Nintendo would like to “provide games that can allow communication between friends and families.”

Furukawa stated:

“It’s true that our recent growth has stemmed from the need for people to stay at home. Even though (Japan’s) state of emergency is over, people are spending more time at home than before. As games with long lifespans like Animal Crossing become more accepted, we believe this will have a significant impact on future development. We want to provide games that can allow communication between friends and families.”

Also in the same interview, Furukawa was asked about how Nintendo is dealing with the shortage of semiconductors and manpower. Based on his comments, there’s a possibility that Switch stock could be impacted.

Furukawa’s full words:

“We currently have enough semiconductors to tide us over with immediate Switch production term. Demand both in Japan and abroad has been very high since the beginning of the year, so there is a possibility we might not be able to meet the demand of all retailers at some point in future.”

We translated other comments from Furukawa in which he spoke about the desire to work on both current and new IPs and how the company is “always thinking about ideas for new consoles”. You can read about that here.

Big thanks to Jarop and centurionnugget for contributing to this post.