Miyamoto Admits Remakes Flood as Switch 2 Looms—But He Bets

Shigeru Miyamoto justified Nintendo’s recent remake wave — Ocarina of Time, Star Fox, and more — with a blunt claim: most players ‘outgrow’ games within five years, so re-releasing them for new audiences makes business sense. He’s not wrong about player behavior, but the logic sits uneasily with the handheld reality Nintendo’s own hardware enables.

A Switch or Steam Deck user who buys a game in 2026 can reasonably expect to replay it in 2031. The suspend-and-resume feature, the curated library on a memory card, the device designed to be picked up and put down across years — these are not accidental traits, but the result of Miyamoto’s ‘fun first’ philosophy. They’re the value proposition of a handheld library. A philosophy that treats a game as expired after five years undermines backward compatibility priorities and long-term eShop support, both of which the 3DS and Wii U closures already demonstrated are fragile.

Miyamoto framed remakes as gateways for younger players who ‘don’t have the opportunity to play games from 10 years ago’ — a stance consistent with how the Star Fox remake was greenlit alongside film plans. That’s fair — but the delivery method matters. Nintendo’s approach is top-down remastering: widescreen, reorchestrated, adjusted controls designed for Switch 2’s larger display. The trade-off is that future portable gamers may never experience Ocarina of Time in its original aspect ratio or visual identity on an official device — only the remade version. For the retro handheld community, where devices like the Analogue Pocket exist precisely to preserve that authenticity, Nintendo’s strategy prioritizes accessibility over preservation. Both have value, but calling it a remake wave undersells what’s actually being replaced.