🎮 Nintendo just posted the full Q&A transcript from its 86th shareholder meeting, and the headlines all went to the stock — down more than half from its August 2025 peak. But scroll past the share-price hand-wringing and there's a different document underneath: 19 questions in which Furukawa, Miyamoto and company quietly laid out how Nintendo actually plans to grow. Here are the answers overseas gamers will want to argue about.

Miyamoto once told Iwata Nintendo shouldn't do any of this

The moment that traveled fastest came when a shareholder asked Shigeru Miyamoto to reflect on the strategy Nintendo now builds everything around — "expanding the number of people who come into contact with our IP."

Miyamoto went back more than 15 years, to conversations with the late president Satoru Iwata. Back then, he said, he was against two of the things Nintendo now leans on hardest: putting games on smartphones, and letting its characters appear anywhere outside Nintendo's own hardware. His worry was creative, not financial — he thought lending Mario out to other media would chip away at the freedom to design games around him.

What changed his mind was the Wii era. He realized the audience you can reach through a game console has a ceiling, while the audience you reach through phones, movie theaters and YouTube basically doesn't. And the purest reason anyone buys a Nintendo console, he argued, was never "it's cheap" or "it has this feature." It's "I want to play this game — I want to play Mario, or Zelda."

Then came the line that lit up the forums. Nintendo's official summary only describes the IP margins as "high," but outlets covering the meeting reported the figures Miyamoto actually gave: the IP business runs at close to 100% profit, hardware at around 30%.

For a company whose stock just got punished over thin Switch 2 hardware margins, that is a very pointed thing to say out loud. It reframes the movies and the theme parks: not as marketing that feeds the games, but as the high-margin engine, with the console as the low-margin front door. Miyamoto pointed to Pikmin Bloom, the Niantic-made mobile game, spreading through Korea and Taiwan on social media as the template — plant the characters everywhere first, sell the games later.

Nintendo headquarters in Kyoto

Nintendo headquarters, Kyoto. Photo: Insightwm / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The backward-compatibility question Nintendo dodged

Question 4 was the one every retro player wanted answered: will DS and 3DS games ever be playable on Switch 2? Furukawa's reply amounted to "nothing specific we can share right now."

For a company that just engineered full backward compatibility into Switch 2, that non-answer is loud. Here's what you can play: through Nintendo Switch Online, the NES, SNES, Game Boy, GBA and N64 libraries — and on Switch 2, GameCube games too. What's conspicuously absent is exactly the DS and 3DS: the two dual-screen systems whose entire design fights a single-screen console.

Furukawa framed it as a technical hurdle Nintendo keeps chipping at. Players read the obvious subtext: the dual-screen catalog runs to hundreds of games, a preservation and re-sale goldmine Nintendo either hasn't cracked technically or hasn't decided it wants to open.

Nintendo admits keeping old games alive is "a challenge"

This is the answer game-preservation people will circle. A shareholder asked how Nintendo thinks about archiving its own history — through books, the Nintendo Museum, and so on.

Furukawa noted the museum, which opened in October 2024, had already drawn more than 800,000 visitors by late April 2026. He acknowledged that old games are increasingly traded as objects with genuine historical value, and that there's a growing movement to publicly archive game software the way libraries archive books. Nintendo, he said, is grateful for the recognition.

Then the careful part. Keeping old games preserved and displayed — and especially keeping them in an actually playable state — carries "certain challenges," he said. Nintendo's answer to that is Nintendo Switch Online.

Preservationists have heard versions of this before, and it tends to land badly. The subtext they hear: Nintendo would rather rent you a curated slice of its back catalog through a subscription than see the wider preservation community keep everything runnable. It's the politest possible framing of a fight that's been simmering for years.

Pokémon cards are about to require a national ID

Question 15 sounds invented until you check it. A shareholder asked what Nintendo and The Pokémon Company (a Nintendo affiliate) are doing about the scalping and speculative hoarding that has warped the Pokémon card market.

Furukawa confirmed the countermeasure already flagged for around August 2026: to enter lotteries and buy certain products from Pokémon Center Online, buyers will verify their identity with Japan's My Number Card — the national ID — by scanning its chip with a smartphone. The ID number itself isn't stored.

Two things make this a talking point abroad. It effectively walls out overseas buyers, since the My Number Card is issued to residents of Japan. And the very idea of flashing a government ID to buy trading cards reads as either eminently sensible or faintly dystopian depending on where you live — a genuine culture-gap moment that set Western forums arguing when the plan first surfaced in May. The backdrop is ugly: Japanese scalping has gotten physical, with reports of confrontations around restocked shelves and card vending machines.

The overseas map: India as "seeding," China going dark

Two questions sketched the international plan. On India (Q8), Furukawa was blunt: it's a huge, attractive market, but Nintendo's brand recognition there is low even by Asian standards, and the work is still at the "seeding" stage — get people to know the characters first, worry about hardware later.

On China (Q9), the news is subtraction. Nintendo's partner Tencent has wound down the Switch's online service in the country — the Chinese eShop stopped selling on March 31, 2026, and the remaining services shut off on May 15. Furukawa's read wasn't retreat so much as redirection: the Tencent years proved China holds a large Nintendo fanbase, and the plan now is to reach it through IP — characters, licensing, touchpoints that don't depend on selling a console at all.

Line that up next to Miyamoto's margin comment and the shape is unmistakable. Where Nintendo can't easily sell you a box, it intends to sell you the characters instead.

A few shorter answers worth flagging

On generative AI (Q13), Furukawa was measured: games have used AI-adjacent techniques for years — enemy behavior being an old example — Nintendo will follow the new laws taking shape market by market, and it will act against anything it judges to infringe its IP, generative or not. He added a very Nintendo point: its IP was never just characters, but characters bound to original ways of playing, and that pairing is the moat.

On the stock and the price hikes (Q10 and Q19), he owned the pain — the share price is under half its August 2025 high — and tied it to the Switch 2 price revision (US: $449.99 to $499.99 from September 1; Japan up ¥10,000, roughly $62, from late May). His fix is the same one Miyamoto named: make software people feel they must have, and the hardware sells itself.

And an era ended quietly: Takashi Tezuka, a designer on the original Super Mario Bros. and a 42-year Nintendo veteran, is stepping down as an executive officer while staying on as a producer.

So what's the actual takeaway?

Strip out the stock talk and the Q&A reads as a fairly honest map of where Nintendo thinks its next decade of growth lives: less in the box under your TV, more in the characters that now travel by phone, by movie screen, by theme-park gate. In Japan, that future already looks like national-ID checks to buy Pokémon cards and a museum pulling 800,000 visitors.

So, two questions for wherever you're reading this. Would you show a government ID to buy trading cards? And when a games company starts telling investors that the merch and the movies out-earn the machines — does that sound like growth to you, or like drift away from the thing that made you a fan?

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