Nintendo has had loads of highs over its few a long time within the online game trade. Popularizing house consoles with the NES, introducing new audiences to video games via the Wii’s movement controls, and the touchscreen Trojan horse that was the Nintendo DS, to call just a few. However usually these successes had been adopted by missteps; the Wii bought 100 million models, whereas its follow-up, the Wii U, couldn’t even handle 1 / 4 of that. However that precarity appears to be like to alter. The Switch is now Nintendo’s best-selling console ever, surpassing the DS with 155 million models bought since its debut in 2017. And over that span Nintendo has reworked itself into an organization higher insulated in opposition to the ever-changing whims of the video games trade.
One of many key elements behind the Change’s success was how it represented a more unified version of Nintendo. In 2013, the corporate merged its two main game development divisions, which had beforehand been break up into house console and handheld teams. Given how the Change straddled the road between console and handheld, this made a number of sense. Nevertheless it additionally allowed Nintendo to place the complete may of its artistic assets behind a single platform. The end result was a string of huge hits: video games like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Tremendous Smash Bros. Final, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Tremendous Mario Odyssey all bought upward of 30 million copies.
Simply as vital, this construction allowed Nintendo to launch massive video games constantly over the Change’s lifespan. Whilst the main target shifted to the following console, the Change’s last years nonetheless included brand-new Zelda and Super Mario video games. The construction has additionally allowed Nintendo to seamlessly proceed this success into the launch of the Change 2, which obtained off to a very fast start and debuted alongside a brand-new Mario Kart, which was adopted by Donkey Kong and Metroid.
However outdoors of video games, which kind the core of the corporate, Nintendo has additionally used the Change’s success to steadily department out in new instructions. In 2023, The Super Mario Bros. Movie hit theaters, earned more than $1 billion, and now Nintendo has each a sequel and a live-action Zelda movie on the best way. Nintendo opened its first theme park in Japan in 2021, and has since expanded to Hollywood and Florida, with a location in Singapore due up subsequent. The company even opened its own museum in 2024. In essence, Nintendo is building an entertainment empire. Its competitors is more and more the likes of Disney and Netflix along with Xbox and PlayStation. “I feel folks view Nintendo as a gaming firm,” Shinya Takahashi, Nintendo’s senior managing government officer, instructed me in 2023. “However we’ve got all the time considered ourselves as an leisure firm.”
It’s not a unique technique: Nearly each online game firm is hoping to interrupt out in movie and tv after the success of initiatives like The Last of Us, Fallout, and A Minecraft Film. However in Nintendo’s case, the corporate appears to know simply how precarious a hit just like the Change will be, and it used that success to steadily construct itself up into one thing larger in a deliberate, concerted means. It’s one thing Nintendo has tried to do earlier than — see: the company’s ill-fated efforts into mobile gaming — however its resurgence in the course of the Change period allowed it to strategy these ventures with a brand new stage of focus and ambition. This can be a firm that’s so assured it’s about to release a $100 re-creation of the Virtual Boy, one among its best failures.
However the brand new Change additionally doesn’t must match its predecessor’s success — it simply wants to permit Nintendo to maintain this momentum going.