The Switch has been a major success so far, reaching historic proportions in sales as it'll likely sell close to 30M in one year, which is unprecedented for any home console. I am very happy it is this much of a success.

However, as crazy as it may sound, I believe the Switch could be doing even better than what it is doing right now even when it is breaking sales records left and right. I believe that if 3rd Party Switch games are advertised more heavily by Nintendo, I think literally everyone and their mother will purchase a Switch and it will be the undisputed greatest selling console ever.

The reason why I believe this is because I notice there seems to be a large market of people who primarily only play multiplat 3rd Party games, such as the casual sport game players, the COD players, and more. And despite how well the Switch is selling right now, there is still a pretty big chunk of people who aren't interested in the Switch since they aren't interested in just Nintendo games and typically aren't aware that the Switch has more than Nintendo games and has nearly every major 3rd Party Franchise on it.

Despite 3rd party games for the most part selling well on the Switch, I still tend to notice a big chunk of people who are completely unaware that the Switch is getting all these multiplats, and I notice when they do realize the Switch has the 3rd Party game they like they immediately grow an interest towards a Switch since the Switch has the unique advantage of being able to play a console multiplat portably, something PS or Xbox can't offer.

There were many times I saw people surprised seeing me play 3rd Party games like Mortal Kombat 11, NBA2k, Witcher 3, Doom. I noticed many people legitimately didn't know the Switch got all these 3rd party games, as they immediately assume that the Switch doesn't get the same 3rd party games PS and Xbox do. This is something that happens too often and I feel like Nintendo should capitalize on this problem.

It's easy to see why people assume Switch doesn't get 3rd Party Games, literally for 25 years since the N64 Nintendo has always missed out on most mulitplats as Nintendo built up an image of having mainly Nintendo games on their systems. However, I believe if Nintendo shows people all these 3rd party games they have on Switch and show the value of being able to play these games anytime anywhere, I think the Switch could appeal to even more people then they are right now.

Nintendo has advertised 3rd Party Games various times in their ads. However, I think they should double down on this, make people aware of these 3rd party games on a portable device. Everyone already knows about the Nintendo games on the Switch, show people what they are unaware of like the 3rd Party Games on Switch.

The biggest issue is they should jsut give larger carts to devs at a cheaper cost so we don't end up with half physical releases. That is a big turn off in sales with games liek 2k sports and EA games

They should also make indy collections published by them. I

I'll come back and read this thread later, but I will just give my two cents before going to bed. There is always room for improvement, but I think they have been doing great with advertising third party games so far. I mean, the last string of Directs was for third parties exclusively. They have been doing better promoting third party games than first party for the last while lol

They spend half of the year promoting only 3rd party titles, so no.

I feel like deep inside Nintendo doesn't like 3rd parties and pray they sell as little as possible without hurting its userbase and hardware sales

Money spending is limited, and Nintendo systems historically have lower software sales per hardware unit than MS/Sony, barely have microtransactions and even DLC aren't as common. So they want their users to buy their own games where they will get 100% of the revenue from sales

Yep does not surprise me. Just pisses me off. I have money to spend but will not spend it on broken games and I think majority of users are the same.

What I was eluding to is advertising isn't really an issue as much as quality of output. Most core gamers know what is coming but when they see the "DOWNLOAD REQUIRED TO PLAY" message then yeh nah go away. Saying that early on I got caught out as it didn't cross my mind such a practice would exist lol. I've cancelled preorders when I went to collect them once I seen it is broken. 

I agree with the OP and want to say that Nintendo marketing, in general, has a lot of room for improvement.  Here are some things they could be doing.

1) RFA needs to be advertised even more and especially toward non-gamers.  This is the successor to Wii Fit and in a world where a lot of gyms are often closed, there is a big potential market of non-gamers who would buy a Switch just for RFA.  I also think Clubhouse games could also get extra marketing like this especially highlighting games like bowling with motion controls.

2) They need to regularly (maybe quarterly) spotlight their most popular indie games.  I looked back at some old indie directs are found that at least half of the indie games that I like were not even in them.  A lot of times the indie games that become popular are not what you'd expect.  

3) They need to list all Switch million+ sellers and not just first party titles.  I'm sure they need to get permission from the 3rd party publishers, but they need to make the effort to get this permission.  Their financial reports will say something like "and X number of other titles sold over 1 million units."  What are those titles?   They don't even need to give specific numbers.  Make it more of a "either you are on the list or not" situation.  Just doing this would spotlight the most popular third party titles even more. 

No. It's their job to promote, and make their games irresistible to the playerbase. Why would Nintendo go out of their way to promote half assed late and expensive ports instead of their own IPs?

Plenty of third party game are spotlighted in their commercials: Skyrim, Super Lucky Tale, Fortnite, let alone directs. The only thing they could probably do more at this point is probably compete for marketing rights the way that Sony and Microsoft do with COD, Anthem, FIFA, etc. How many of those games Nintendo even gets let alone gets something to advertise proudly is.....debatable.

I'm not sure that they can show off sales. It strikes me as something legally compromiseable. Like...it's the sort of thing I'm sure they have data on, but a data bit they can't show off legally.

In what capacity? They already advertise third party games quite a lot on their news channel, much of their social media, and video ads.