Nintendo Switch won’t exclusively target core gamers

People may have read too much into Nintendo’s use of fashionable youngsters in its reveal video for the Nintendo Switch.

The video’s depiction of Switch being the social centre of young adult life was interpreted by many as a statement of intent from a company whose typical market is viewed as being skewed towards younger gamers and families.

Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima has now told Bloomberg that while a core gaming audience was the intended audience for the reveal, the system’s target market won’t necessarily follow suit.

As the name implies, we’re switching a lot of things. But we have no interest in switching our customers,” he explained. We have no intention of just going after a certain age group. Depending on the kind of software that comes out, families and kids will be able to play too.

The titles we did show, those are games that for people who understand they will grasp it right away, but for families and kids, we want them to understand by actually experiencing it.

Our core philosophy is that we want to increase the number of gamers at all ages, and there’s no change to that. So we have no intention to lean just towards core gamers. But to communicate our new idea, when you think about who will understand it first, naturally it will be people who really understand games. To communicate that as quickly as possible, we focused on those folks who really understand games.”

Kimishima added that further details about Switch, including a range of accessories for the device, will be revealed in January.

Here’s a reminder of the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5uik5fgIaI