RolStoppable said:
There's no good reason to get excited about China, because their game approval process is so slow that barely anything gets released. It will be very hard to build momentum, so it will take a long time until Switch has enough of a back catalogue in China to go mainstream. |
Most Nintendo games get approval, one of the reasons we no longer having such scalper issues for Ring Fit Adventure worldwide is because it launched officially in China in September. Those two games are enough to maintain momentum for the next year coupled with all the evergreens a gamer can buy in China that already localized.
It was noted by Niko Partners that Switch is already catching up to PS4 Lifetime sales.
Overall we will see the impact of China in the next two quarterly reports by Nintendo, Koei, Marvelous but 150% growth is not driven by just South Korea and Taiwan. I think you are underestimating how Tencent pushing Ring Fit or Animal Crossing being so huge with women will impact the video game market in China. I actually expect console adoption to accelerate in the coming years there. Tencent already has a stake in a lot of Japanese companies, so I'm sure the approval process for the likes of Age of Calamity, Harvest Moon, Rune Factory 5 etc. is not going to be that difficult. Age of Calamity already has Chinese localization, the case is probably the same for Harvest Moon and Rune Factory 5.
The bigger get would be if Monster Hunter Rise launches in China, that could be a pretty huge game for Capcom. If they manage to release the game in China while the Switch is red-hot, it could be a recipe for an unprecedented year for the company. In the past they had worked with Tencent to bring over MHW but that was halted by the new approval process, so Monster Hunter would be something very new for the vast majority of Chinese gamers
https://phys.org/news/2018-08-monster-hunter-china-video-games.html
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/2/20751368/nintendo-switch-china-tencent-launch-partner
