TheNintendo Switchis one of the Japanese console maker’s most successful platforms ever, even ousting the extremely popular Wii to become the third best-selling video game console of all time. While the Switch has a firm place in video game history, it is the case that Nintendo fans have been antsy for some time waiting for its successor with talk about a Switch Pro or a Switch 2 rumbling on in the background.
A new job posting however shows indications of Nintendo’s thoughts about the next generation. And funnily enough it’s for the NERDs among you. Well, to be specific, Nintendo European Research & Development (NERD). The job offer was shared onResetEraand details a posting for a ‘Game Technologies R&D Engineer/Scientist’. This person will be needed for, among other things, “high performance implementation” and “cross-platform development”.
Related:The Next Nintendo Console Should Just Be A Better Switch
Thejob offerlooks to be legitimate and is dated for this year and includes some highly suggestive tidbits that might offer clues about Nintendo’s future. As mentioned, the job offer is for NERD, which is a French subsidiary of Nintendo and located in central Paris. Apparently, this more tech focused offshoot of the company works with their Japanese and American counterparts on such things as emulation, signal processing, computer vision, and machine learning, among other things. But this specific job posting relates to game development.
The job will need the applicant to work on real-time rendering and game engine architecture but here’s the key part—“The goal will be to aim for and go beyond state-of-the-art solutions in these fields, targeting current and next generation Nintendo platforms”. It continues, “It will be necessary to collaborate with game developers to bring new technologies to the market”.
Among the console platforms remaining, Nintendo has been the hardest to predict. While Xbox and PlayStation are locked in an arms race developing ever more powerful consoles and focusing on resolution and GPU grunt, Nintendo has been chipping away at its own thing ever since the Wii. While the GameCube still vied with the PS2 and Xbox, it was the Wii that first marked the Kyoto veteran as trying to do something very different with that console’s USP being its motion controls. The Switch only further amplified the difference with the console’s hybrid nature eventually proving a smash hit after some initial confusion (it might be hard to recall but some critics were initially baffled by its design coming after the unpopularity of the Wii U).
While it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Nintendo is working on the next generation, since console development takes many, many years, the NERD job offer does offer clues with the real-time rendering and cross-platform development mentions especially suggestive, and, as ResetEra commentors pointed out, could mean that NSO is carried over to the next generation. As ever, it’s hard to predict what the company will do next, but whenever it does announce the Switch’s successor the games world will be shaken up once more.
