In a recent interview, Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aimé talked about the company’s smashing Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday 2018 sales, as well as how game development is prioritized at Nintendo. [Thanks, Hollywood Reporter!]
Here are the highlights:
What made the five-day period surrounding Black Friday such a huge success this year?
I think it’s a number of things. First, consumers look at Black Friday as an opportunity to get their holiday purchasing going. They look at values out of the marketplace and for us, it was really important to message the type of value that we will have with Nintendo Switch during the holiday season. For Black Friday, specifically, we had a hardware bundle that included Mario Kart 8 Deluxe — arguably one of our best-selling games — a game that consumers are already voting with their wallets that they want. That bundle sold out immediately. Then, we had a strong dedicated offer for Cyber Monday and this was offering $35 in e-shop credit when you bought through the dot-com retailers. What we saw that was gratifying is that both of those deals sold out quickly and then consumers started buying stock at regular price. That’s what we expect to continue. There’s going to be no more significant deals for Nintendo Switch. We’re only in our second holiday and the consumer is indicating that, for them, this product, with this great alignment of software really is a must-have product and something that they need to have now.
What are the priorities internally at Nintendo in terms of maintaining established brands, courting third-party developers and choosing which ports to bring onto your consoles?
First, let’s talk about third-party. From our perspective, we want all of the best third-party content to make it to our platform, whether that’s coming from the big publishers and developers or whether it’s the independent community. As an example, we’re thrilled that Celeste won [best independent game at the Game Awards] and Overcooked 2 won [best family game] and Dead Cells won [best action game]. These are all games that are on our platform and are performing exceptionally well for us. So, we want that content on our platform and we’re thrilled when Bethesda gives us the level of support that they have or Take-Two gives us the level of support that they have. Now, when it comes to games from previous Nintendo generations — It’s a statement of fact that the Wii U was not as successful as we hoped it would be and yet that platform had fantastic content. Now that the install base of Nintendo Switch is so much larger, it gives us an opportunity to bring those great games back and share it with consumers that maybe hadn’t participated in the previous generation. For us, we’re clear that, in terms of Nintendo-developed games, we want to bring new experiences from our best franchises to Nintendo Switch, and that’s what you see with Smash Bros. and Pokemon. We also want to make sure that if a consumer didn’t experience a great game, like Captain Toad, that we make it available on the platform as well. For third-party, big or small, we want all that best content to come.
You can read the full interview here.
