New Nintendo President Will Have "Final Say" On Which Games Nintendo Makes

We reported a few days ago that the current Nintendo president is stepping down, to be replaced with a young up-and-comer known as Shuntaro Furukawa, who will, fun fact, be the first Nintendo President to take the role when the company is having a good year. We don’t know much about how he plans to run the company, but in a recent interview with Japanese newspaper Nikkei (and reported by Game Informer), we’ve learned he’s already got some big plans for how things will change up when he takes charge.

Perhaps the biggest change he mentioned was that he believes that Nintendo’s current approval process – or how games are greenlit for official production – is too slow and goes through far too many people. His suggested solution (a solution likely to be implemented) is to cut through the middlemen.

Now, a board of five executives, himself included, will review all potential games and make the final decision on whether the game "makes sense to proceed.” He will have the final say on “how the game will benefit the company.”

Sounds a bit… authoritative, doesn’t it? Speaking as someone who’s worked with his fair share of big companies, there are definitely pluses and minuses to this approach. On one hand, yes, companies as big as Nintendo tend to be unwieldy, and getting one idea from conception to store shelves can be quite the nightmare. On the other hand, if the people selected for this game review board are bad at their jobs, it means we’ll get significantly worse games out of the big N, either because their tastes are bad or because they greenlit a project that their underlings are severely uninterested in.

As for who might be on this board, the only one we know for sure is Furukawa himself. Yoshiaki Koizumi, the guy behind Super Mario Galaxy and the Switch, seems like a likely candidate, and of course, Shigeru Miyamoto is a strong possibility, if he decides he wants a part of it.

We’ll just have to see how it ultimately turns out, though.