I’m still fascinated by the Switch and what it may be hiding. There’s a fantastic interview here you can read, talking with the two designers of it. For the most part it’s standard information you’d expect, but I find some of it worthy of note:
There was a move away from “Old Nintendo” (ie. Miyamoto) to the younger staff who are full of endless ideas but usually don’t have opportunities. That’s a very important thing to consider about Nintendo today. Pokemon Go, Mario Run, Breath of the Wild, and Mario Odyssey all feel more thoughtful than the awful Star Fox Zero created by Miyamoto. The old staff is being pushed aside to make way for the young (who are probably still in their 30’s and 40’s, but just young by comparison).
Nintendo wants to make sure there’s a “continuous line” of products to keep the Switch interesting to people, and even their announcements are being treated as events. This is different from companies like Microsoft and Sony, who race to announce everything under the Sun, even when those games will never be released (such as the Rockstar game Agent or the Xbox One exclusive Scalebound). This makes it harder to judge, but they say they want to surpass past consoles in terms of the number of games available, which is why they included compatibility with Unreal engine, etc.
Here they claim that the Switch is primarily as “home console at heart”, but I still think this is just being cute with the marketing. The fact that it functions perfectly as a home console makes it hard to dispute, though.
When discussing the name “Switch” for the system, they give the straightforward answer that it would mark a break away from old hardware, and make it easy to understand for people overseas. I wouldn’t expect them to say anything about being able to switch the pieces of the hardware out, but there is this interesting bit…
Time will tell whether this is the true legacy of the Switch.