This article was originally written for TheNintendoVillage.com, a website I founded and ran from 2018 to 2021.

You may have caught the article yesterday that featured some translations of a recent interview with Shigeru Miyamoto. The father of Mario revealed he’s no longer ‘upending the tea table’ by completely changing development halfway through, and spoke about Nintendo’s focus on making fun experiences over what sells.

Nintendo Everything have now done some more work on the translation and brought us some interesting info from the legendary designer on what he thinks has helped the Switch become the roaring success it has. In short, Miyamoto reckons it was good timing due to the fact people often carry devices with them these days, not least their phones:

“The Switch released with good timing in this age where people are walking around and using devices like smartphones. And yet, they get loaded up with a lot of data. So for this reason, we thought it should be relatively easy for a single console with a single technological architecture to succeed, given the situation. For mobile there are many different hardware versions that all have to be accounted for, so you don’t know what else is going to come along with it all.”

We certainly wouldn’t disagree that the Switch’s portability has played a factor in it’s success, but we’d say it’s also down to a stellar library, strong marketing, and the fact the console delivers 100% on its core premise - being a powerful home console you can play on your TV or take with you on-the-go.

Do you think Nintendo just got lucky with the timing or do you think that’s not quite as big a factor as Miyamoto reckons? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Source: Nintendo Everything