Global Hardware 2 February 2019

[The_Liquid_Laser]

Mnementh said:

The_Liquid_Laser said:
Heh, Japan and Europe view the Switch so differently. Japan is currently selling more Switches than all of Europe.

This shows how bad Nintendo in general performs in europe. Japan has 130 million inhabitants, europe has 750 million. Even if you only count the EU, that are over 500 million people. Nintendo really needs to step up their game in europe, it hurts them that they are so behind in this region.

I agree.  However it also shows how strong they are in Japan.  In Europe the Switch is currently viewed as an "average" console.  It's not a flop, but it's nothing special either.  In Japan it is selling like crazy in spite of its $300 price tag.  That shows just how much Japan really loves the Switch.

And both territories are extremely important.  Obviously there is a lot more profit potential in Europe.  However Japan has a lot of significance strategically.  Nintendo has put a lot of effort into shutting Sony out of Japan.  The advantage here is that Japan has a disproportionately high amount of development studios.  If you exclude indies, then almost half of the remaining games come from Japan.  Since Nintendo is dominating the Japanese market it also means that most Japanese developers will focus on making games for the Switch.  (The exceptions being really big developers like Capcom and Square-Enix.)  

The Switch is going to get a lot of third party exclusive content.  Sure most of it will be Japanese games that are small-medium in budget, but that is still a lot of exclusive content.  Every system needs its share of big games, but Nintendo is capable of making the big games on its own.  Over the next couple of years Switch is going to get more and more exclusives that are small-medium Japanese games that will fill in the gaps that Nintendo can't fill on their own.  I know when that happens, North America is going to swing very hard towards the Switch, even more than they are doing now.  I believe that Europe will too, but it might take them a bit longer to come around.  The console with the best game library is always the winner each generation.  Switch will have the best game library for generation 9.