Cognition Dissemination: Don’t Panic About the Next Nintendo President. Yet.

It’s been a long and arduous road for Nintendo’s leadership since the untimely passing of Satoru Iwata in July 2015. At the time, it appeared Iwata was grooming Yoshiaki Koizumi to take his place, since he presumably wanted someone else with game development experience in the position. But he wasn’t able to finish this before he passed, which left Tatsumi Kimishima to take his place. Kimishima’s appointment appeared temporary considering he was 65 when he took the position, older than Iwata when he died. Considering Koizumi was still omnipresent with promoting Nintendo’s games, logic assumed he would assume the mantle in due time.

As it turns out, that assessment wasn’t entirely accurate. While Kimishima will indeed be stepping down soon, it won’t be for Koizumi but Shuntaro Furukawa. This sent Nintendo fans who like Koizumi into a little panic, which evolved into a full-on panic when they read more details about his background, and his itinerary for the company’s future despite knowledge that he’s been playing video games since his childhood. But his plans aren’t too bad once you carefully read through them.

Furukawa joined Nintendo in May 2012 as an outside director of The Pokémon Company. He was subsequently promoted to General Manager of Corporate Planning Department at Nintendo in July 2015, and then shifted to Officer and Supervisor of Corporate Analysis & Administration Division in July 2016. He’ll leave that position to assume the role of president on June 28th, assuming shareholders approve of the move (and they likely will). This means he’ll follow in the footsteps of Kimishima and former president Hiroshi Yamauchi in having no game development experience.

Furukawa wants the company to place a larger focus on mobile game development, to turn it into a 100 million yen ($910 million) venture. Nintendo’s mobile games generated under 40 percent of that in the last fiscal year, which was considered a less-than-satisfactory performance despite Fire Emblem Heroes and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp doing well. This means you should expect Nintendo’s internal developers to place a larger focus on developing mobile games, instead of the occasional one like they’re releasing now.

While Mario Kart Tour will be one of Nintendo’s key upcoming mobile games, they announced another one with their financial results: Dragalia Lost. This is a free-to-play action RPG that’s a collaboration between Nintendo and CyGames, the latter of which is known for several mobile hits, especially Granblue Fantasy. It will release in Japan and several Asian territories sometime this summer, and in English sometime afterward. It’s the kind of game that would have been made for a dedicated handled during the days of the DS and PSP, and perhaps even the 3DS and Vita era. But we’re living in a brave new world.

The combination of these two announcements had fans fearing the worst, that Nintendo will be placing more focus on mobile at the expense of Switch software. Some of them believe the recent stream of Wii U ports like Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze (which released on Friday), Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition, and Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker are proof that Nintendo’s already covering up for the resources they’ve shifted to mobile development. But that’s just an assumption, since it takes a while for any company to develop high-budget HD games. Furukawa did a little damage control here by saying the Switch will still be the focus, but several concerned fans won’t believe this until they see no noticeable changes in Nintendo’s lineup.

Speaking of that: Furukawa is also making changes to how software projects are green lit. He plans to form a committee whose five members will approve or reject concepts, while Furukawa himself will be given the final say regarding whether the project goes through or not. This sounds ominous on the surface, because it implies Nintendo will be stricter than they were with approving new titles, which would lead to risker ideas not making it through.

But this will be a good change compared to what the company had before. Previously, concepts had to make their way through a larger group before they could be green lit for development, which could take ages. Whether more innovative projects are green lit from here on will depend on who the chairpersons are, so this is another case where it’s tough to tell whether this will be to the benefit or detriment of Nintendo’s Switch software output. It depends on how their software offerings for Switch change over the years, if they change at all.

There are a lot of unknown factors here, but we can be certain that several changes will be made to how Nintendo works in the next few years as the new president implements his unique strategy. For now, we’ll have to (figuratively) cross our fingers and hope everything goes well, as Nintendo could find themselves in trouble if their software offerings become too safe. It hasn’t been that long since it felt like Nintendo was inundating the audience with Mario games, like when two New Super Mario Bros. titles released within months of each other in 2012, and hopefully that won’t be repeated.

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