In an interview with IGN‘s Logan Plant, Nintendo of America Vice President Bill Trinen covered a myriad of topics including GameChat. While this has been a staple of the gaming industry for years, this marks the first time that Nintendo is providing native social interaction without use of a mobile app. When asked why now is the time to offer the welcome change, Trinen said:
“Well, I would say we’ve always looked at it from the perspective of, ‘what is Nintendo’s real strength and what are Nintendo’s real values?’ And for us, the most important thing is putting smiles on people’s faces and doing it in a way that people can see and experience the smiles that they have with the people that are most important to them.
And certainly there have been other game systems with chat and things like that up until now, but what we wanted to do was to take something that could finally replicate that same room, couch multiplayer, couch co-op experience and joy, and bring that into an online space. And so for us, GameChat is why it’s so important is the combination of being able to see their faces, being able to see what they’re doing from a gameplay perspective and being able to feel like you’ve finally got a virtual space where you can have those same experiences that you might have in your living room. So that’s why with the power of, I would say Switch 2, being able to finally execute that has been a big focus for us.”
Source: IGN
