Furukawa: Announcing Switch/NX So Early Was A "Special Case"

[Soundwave]

zorg1000 said:

Soundwave said:

Well for one, plenty of Nintendo hardware has launch in June-August. 

The Famicom, Game Boy Advance (US), Super NES (US), Nintendo 64 (Japan) and then you have Switch, GameCube (Japan), 3DS also launch outside of November. I guess you can add Virtual Boy to that list too. 

Not every Nintendo product has to launch in November, really I don't even think November is a great release date. 

Launching in August/September is better, you get early adopters to have their own time period and then you get the holiday rush later on as a second boost. 

Revealing Feb/March (so that the impact on current FY sales is minimal) and following the same unveil to release time frame from the Switch, puts you into July/August. 

Obviously it will depend on what software is ready, hopefully Nintendo is not behind schedule on that. One would think they have learned their lesson on that. 

Nintendo doing something over 20 years ago isn’t really a good reason for thinking they will do it now. Every generation of the last 20 years has either released during the holidays (DS, Wii, Wii U) or was planned for the holidays but delayed to Q1 of the following year (3DS, Switch).

I agree that a holiday launch isn’t important for consoles but that doesn’t mean console manufacturers feel the same way. There is literally zero reason to think they will launch a new console in the summer, wanting something to happen and thinking it will happen are two different things.

Depends where their software pipeline is too ... previously they still had to support multiple consoles (when they launched the DS, for example they still had to make GameCube and even GBA games, when they launched Wii U, they were still neck deep in trying to establish the 3DS and it required a lot of dev resources too). 

As such I think they basically were forced to launch hardware as late as possible in the year without just missing the entire year entirely (so November/December launches and as you mentioned, sometimes they missed even this and were forced to launch in Q1 to at least be able to make the fiscal year end). 

But because this isn't the same case any longer, perhaps they can launch in a manner that suits more of how they would like to launch, rather than being forced to launch at the last possible moment. 

Ultimately though I don't think say an August launch versus a November launch makes all the much difference in the grand scheme of things.