NintendObs Thinks: Sales were never the reason, only the excuse.
Why hardware and software sales do not drive decision-making in the videogame industry.
You’ve heard it this week, Nintendo Switch has officially surpassed the Wii in sales, becoming Nintendo’s best-selling home console of all times with more than 100 million units sold in and sold through to customers. Not only that, but with more than 98 million annual playing users in its most recent full year of 2021, the Nintendo Switch is anything but a fad, and rather a booming business in which consumers keep on buying games after the games from Nintendo and anyone on the platform. Par for the course, Nintendo doesn’t brag about it, they didn’t even mention one-upping the Wii explicitly in their financial announcements, so naturally I’m taking it upon myself to do it for them.
Very soon, and probably this year, Nintendo Switch will also outsell the current market leader in videogame consoles, the one and only PlayStation 4. Indeed, focusing here exclusively on official numbers provided by their own companies (and thus legally binding), the latest disclosed cumulative sell-through units of PlayStation 4 hardware stand at 106.0 million as of December 31, 2019, something Nintendo Switch could attain by the end of this fiscal year — Pokémon Legends Arceus oblige — before presumably surpassing the current conveniently undisclosed numbers of Sony’s moneymaker by the end of this calendar year.
Thus begs the obvious question: what happened to saying this or that “third-party” game is not on Nintendo Switch because of Nintendo hardware sales? What happened to publishers’ “fears” of not being able to make money on Nintendo because the install base of Nintendo’s console would not be satisfactory? Well, I’m here to tell you that was never the reason why these games “skipped” Nintendo consoles every time they would debut and launch, only the excuse. Because in today’s videogame market, especially at the cost of producing and marketing videogames right now, sales of titles alone are no longer the key driver of decision-making in choosing what games to make and on which platforms they ought to be played.