"Nintendo users only buy Nintendo games on Nintendo systems" How true was this?

[Shadow1980]

Zippy6 said:

Shadow1980 said:

Let's put it this way. Nintendo's own financial data indicates that first-party software sales are in any given quarter consistently between 70% to 90% of all software sales.

The percentage Nintendo lists for first party in their fiscal reports is for their revenue not unit sales in-case you weren't aware.

So for the case of the 2020 report you linked:

It says total dedicated video game platform sales are 1254.1bn yen so basically for this fiscal year the breakdown is the following:

Dedicated Video Game Platform Revenue - 1254.1 bn yen
Hardware Revenue - 654.6 bn yen
Software Revenue - 599.5 bn yen

First Party Software Revenue - 496.4 bn yen
Third Party Software Revenue - 103.1 bn yen
Digital Software Revenue - 203.8 bn yen

Obviously Nintendo gets a much better cut of the revenue of first party titles so the money spent by consumers on third party titles will be greater than the 17.2% that make up Nintendo's cut for FY20.

Using total software sales and Nintendo's disclosed first party sales in terms of unit sales first to third party is close to 50/50 on Switch.

You sure? It says "Proportion of first-party software sales to total dedicated video game platform software sales" without specifying if it was revenue or units.

In either case, even if it is revenue, it does show how dependent Nintendo is on their own first-party output. Of course, that's different than saying "People buy Nintendo systems to play Nintendo games." While that phrase is reductionist, the fact that very few third-party games do well on Nintendo systems is telling. Most Switch owners probably do have at least one or two third-party games (I have a copy of Octopath Traveler, and I downloaded Blaster Master Zero when I got the system at launch), but first-party games are clearly the main event.