Reggie on Nintendo Switch Online, Nintendo’s back catalog, more
Forbes has a new interview up with Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America. Reggie was asked about what we can expect from Nintendo Switch Online as well as the company’s back catalog. He also commented further on why Switch has been in short supply and the importance of the first-party Switch games out of the gate.
Hear what Reggie had to say about these topics below. You can find the full interview on Forbes here.
On what happened with Switch’s supply problems…
Let’s rewind the clock. So we announced that for the month of March, we would sell two million units. [That] was the guidance we provided. And if you go back and look at the analyst reports and comments from the experts in the industry, they framed that as wildly optimistic. Wildly optimistic. Some of the projections that I saw for the first calendar year pegged the volume somewhere in the range of five million units globally. The reality is, just in the month of March, on a global basis, we sold through 2.7 million units. So the reality is that Nintendo had a well defined supply chain. We were prepared to deliver against that supply chain. We had estimates of demand. But the reality is that the demand came in well in excess of even our high end estimates, so we were then in a position of playing catch up. And we’ve been playing catch up ever since. We’ve stated publicly we’ve continued to improve the supply chain, the production continues to ramp up… but that’s what happened. When you look at the realities of supply we dramatically over-delivered for launch in terms of March launch month, but the demand has been well in excess of even our high end estimates.
On how important having Zelda: Breath of the Wild was in driving Switch demand and Mario Odyssey’s importance for the holidays…
It was absolutely critically important to have strong Nintendo IP at the launch, and we were extremely fortunate for that to be Legend of Zelda. In particular, in the Americas that I have responsibility for, Zelda is a franchise that is very well developed. Obviously a game that many talk about as potentially one of the best ever created in this gaming industry. It was a fantastic way to kick off the launch of Nintendo Switch. And Super Mario Odyssey is gonna be a great bookend to that. But I would say this. We have a plethora of great IP, and we were fortunate to deliver on the steady cadence of content. I can tell you that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was just as critically important. The multiplayer aspect of that game really is something that gave us an added element, versus Zelda which is a single player experience. That was critically important. Continuing to drive Splatoon 2 as a very important franchise for us, was critically important. The launch of new IP in ARMS was critically important. So I would reinforce that for us, yes a new Zelda, a new Mario game within the first 10 months of launching a new system is great –but it’s the steady cadence of high quality content which is really the Nintendo secret sauce.
On what Nintendo Switch Online is going to look like…
I’m not going to tell you exactly what it’s going to look like. We’ll share more about that next year. But what I can tell you is that our vision is to have a robust online environment that not only provides the mechanism for you to have your multiplayer experiences and matchmaking, those elements are minimum. Our goal is to provide that extra Nintendo twist, and that’s what makes our company historically so effective. We don’t do things the same way everyone else does. We relish being different. We see that difference as an element that makes us more compelling to the consumer. And so having that differentiated experience is what we are focused on and we’ll unveil more next year as we’re closer to the launch of the service.
On Nintendo’s back catalog…
Again, [as far as] details around Nintendo Online and what that service is, we’re gonna deal with that separately. Regarding our back catalog, we are in an incredibly fortunate situation that we have a robust back catalog. Not only robust in number, but robust in truly best of all time types of games. Our strategy today is to leverage that with the NES Classic and SNES Classic. And we believe what we’re offering at a set price is a fantastic value for the consumer. And a way not only for adults like myself to relive playing the Super NES and all of the great games on that platform, 21 of them, but that it provides an opportunity for new players to experience all of this great content. And we think that is a fantastic way to do it. It’s both rekindling nostalgia but also creating a passion for Metroid, creating a passion for intellectual property that newer players may just not have ever tried. And we think that is a really effective strategy. So that’s what we’ve done with the NES, that’s what we’ve done with the SNES. Again, what the future looks like we’ll talk about in a different setting. But we believe monetizing our content, exposing it to consumers in that way is a great execution of our strategy.
