Switch Ships 141.32 Million Units as of March 2024

[Jumpin]

curl-6 said:

Switch Sports saw a bigger increase this quarter than Animal Crossing, Smash, TOTK, BOTW, basically every title except for MK8, Wonder, and the new releases.
It really has become a sleeper hit.

I’ve felt for a while now that Nintendo has a tendency to ignore some obvious areas of high demand. This also happened with casual gaming, they dropped (well, more like a prolonged fumble of) the ball, by scaling back toward the end of the Wii/DS era, and then iOS devs picked it up and made it into the largest category of the last 15 years. And when I say “casual game” I don’t mean “games made for idiots” but rather the type of game designed for short sessions and the game persists over a long period of time (usually years).

To be fair, Nintendo does seem to have been making a solid effort - Animal Crossing NH and Pokémon Go being the most obvious success stories. But it feels like they often don’t take advantage of their own properties as well as they should - Pokémon Go is nowhere to be found on Nintendo hardware; and despite what many believe, Let’s Go Pikachu is not a port of Pokémon Go, but rather a remake of the original Pokémon game.

But this fumbling seems to not be anywhere near as bad as the motion gaming industry, they smashed the ball out of the park with that in the Wii era - and the decline in motion gaming seems to be more about the lack of supply rather than the lack of demand - that’s why these token games probably make it the highest per capita category/genre on Switch, and perhaps of all categories this generation on dedicated hardware - with all the games selling millions to tens of millions of units despite not having particularly high production values while still being priced relatively high compared to other games.

Nintendo is highly successful as is, so it’s hard to look at them and say “they made mistakes here” - perhaps they’re just so damn good at the other stuff that they don’t have the capacity to be as successful as they should be at these other things that they are also great at doing. If anything, I’ll end this rant saying this is a next generation opportunity. The demand for motion games is still there, and it’s between Nintendo and VR platforms to capture it.

Last edited by Jumpin - on 16 May 2024