Hideo Kojima Praises Switch as the Next Evolution of Gaming

Hideo Kojima is typically a guy you pay attention too, even if he’s not always on-the-level when it comes to the games industry. He’s clever and he knows it, and combined with the fact he always knows he has a future in the industry, means that he’s oftentimes prone to trolling his fans and the press. This was perhaps best illustrated with the Metal Gear Solid 2 demo, which starred Snake, only for the actual MGS2 to star a character nobody asked for or liked, Raiden.

So bear that in mind when we hear, from an interview with IGN, that Kojima thinks that the Nintendo Switch is the bee’s knees, and the future of gaming. Indeed, he spent the interview lavishing praise on the system, calling it the start of cloud-based gaming and a return of a phrase he’s been trying to coin since the PS3 era, “Transfarring”.

“You might be familiar with the fact that for a previous game that I did, we had a specification that we called 'Transfarring' where you could take the saved data from the PS Vita and move it over to the PS3 and back and forth like that… believe [Switch] is an extension of that idea. The fact you can play something at home and take it outside, this is the gamer's dream. The Switch is an evolution of that”

He continued to say that he felt the future of gaming was on the cloud, which is not an unfair estimation:

“I feel like cloud technology is what everything will eventually move to/ It's further behind right now than I think where people thought it would be at this point, but I think it will go there, and when the infrastructure is ready, you'll be able to play everything, on every device, anywhere. The Switch is the predecessor to this step."

Of course, Cloud-based gaming was something that Microsoft tried to pioneer with the always-online Xbox One, but the backlash against that particular effort was so swift and fierce that they quickly retracted that notion and made Xbox One offline-compatible. While I would agree that an always-online future is inevitable, there will always be backlash at the notion until the internet situation in the United States, which actually has one of the worst internets in the modern world, is improved dramatically.

But hey, if the Switch is the first step in that direction, that'd be alright with me. It's worth note that, despite his praise, Kojima announced no plans to make a Switch game, either now or in the future. Tough luck, eh Nintendo?