The Nintendo Switch release also marked the return of NVIDIA to the console space, as the new Nintendo console is powered by the Tegra chip. In a recent financial call, the NVIDIA CEO explained how his company came to work with Nintendo on its latest console.
NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang recently revealed that the Nintendo Switch delighted him in a way that no other console did in the past 10, 15 years.
Somebody asked me a few months ago before it was launched how I thought it was going to do. And of course without saying anything about it, I said that it delighted me in a way that no game console has done in the last 10 – 15 years. And it’s true, this is a really, really innovative product and really quite ingenious. And if you ever have a chance to get it in your hands, it’s just really delightful.
With its innovative features, working on the Nintendo Switch was really enticing, but things had to be done properly, as engineers could have been working for other major NVIDIA initiatives. In the end, everything turned out well, with the partnership with Nintendo becoming a perfect collaboration.
And so in that case, the opportunity to work on it was just really, really too enticing. We really wanted to do it, but it always requires deep strategic thought because it took several hundred engineers to work on, and they could be working on something else like all of the major initiatives we have. And so we have to be mindful about the strategic opportunity cost that goes along with these. But in the case of the Nintendo Switch, it’s just a home run. I’m so glad I did it, and it was the perfect collaboration for us.
The Nintendo Switch console is now out in all regions.