The craziest thing is that this holiday New Horizon will be one of the Top 5 Games during Obon, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and December, along with the Switch. It will continue to sell more hardware because it's basically not competing with any other Nintendo game(or any other dedicated video game that costs $60 for that matter). It's going to be attracting a new audience that otherwise would have spent their money on something entirely not related to gaming. This audience probably doesn't even know PS5 or X1S are launching.
Top that off with actual supply for Ring Fit Adventure during big holiday weeks. And you have two types of new additional audiences you can market Nintendo Switch too.
The hardware sales during the holiday quarter this year can be something like 15M, if we keep the same ratio as last year's results we are talking 4.5M NSW L and 10.5M NSW. I actually think the ratio for Lites will be higher this year so something like 6M NSW L vs 9M NSW for the holidays.
I'm expecting Animal Crossing: New Horizon to sell above seven million during the holiday, while Ring Fit entirely depends on their DLC Plans and marketing but I think that 2020 will be a lot like 2008. I've said it before but it's no coincidence Nintendo peaked between 2008 and 2010, the Financial Crisis gave video gaming a major boost. The same is happening this year but when people are looking for escapism from stress in their life, I think Nintendo hits the cord, while AAA narrative games don't.
Ring Fit deserves a "second" launch where stock is finally plentiful and a big update to the game would be a terrific way to market the game during busy holiday months. This is a game from the team behind Wii Sports/Fit Franchise, Nintendo will definitely be putting big marketing behind the game as soon they are able to produce enough copies to meet the demand for the holiday season. The game also synergizes much better with the more expensive Switch model, which doesn't put a bundle out of the question. It could actually outsell New Horizon in the holidays and surpass 15M units this year(at 4M right now).
The only question remains the big fall title to really ensure the core audience is also interested.
In any case a fun article from January 2008:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/jan/24/nintendo.news
"Some people say the overall economy is getting worse and consumption is weakening. But our industry seems to be pretty well shielded from what's going on," Mori added.
The Daiwa Research Institute predicts that Nintendo will overtake Sony as the world's biggest maker of game consoles this year.
Sales of the Wii, with its wand-like remote controller, have been driven by a combination of price - at ¥25,000 it is considerably cheaper than Sony's PlayStation 3 - and its appeal to women and novice gamers.
Hit software titles such as Wii Sports, Wii Fit and Super Mario Galaxy helped Nintendo clean up over the Christmas sales period. It outsold the PS3 by three-to-one in Japan in December, according to the game magazine publisher Enterbrain, while sales in the US for the month were almost double those of the Sony machine, the market research firm NPD Group said.
In Japan this holiday it would be something like six-to-one if not worse between the Switch and PS5, while three-to-one in the US sounds about right. People underestimate Nintendo but I think they are prepared for a 30 million FY and that's without having to cut the price by $50/¥5,000.
Now if they also cut the price by $50/¥5,000 I actually think manufacturing 30 million Switches would not be enough to satisfy demand.
We've seen this movie play out before... the question is how Nintendo invests all that money around this time next year(July/August) having surpassed >80M in terms of their userbase, tens of millions of people paying them $20/¥2,000 per year to play Animal Crossing: New Horizon and other online games, while dominating 90% of the Japanese Video Game Hardware market... while also releasing the sequel to one of the highest reviewed games of all time Breath of the Wild with at least 5 more exclusive 1st party games yet to come during 2021.
Meanwhile, PS5 and X1S have no more than >25M userbase between em
In such a scenario they would plan to sell at least 25M during 2021 FY.
This type of situation would put them in a very particular position, where all of a sudden EA is marketing the PS4/Switch versions more than the PS5/X1S because they cannot afford, not to market them... If anything I say comes out correct, the industry giants are going to be purchasing a lot of indie developers and smaller studios who've found success on the Switch in the past three years. Also, you'd probably be able to play some type of Halo game on your Switch along with other Microsoft exclusives.
Last edited by noshten - on 07 August 2020
