Jean Case, early AOL exec, on Recode Decode hosted by Kara Swisher:

I see remarkable female founders. I’ve been mentoring one for a long time. She has a startup in New York called Real World Playbook. She says it’s the Warby Parker for adulthood.

She realizes she’s a privileged person. She went to Princeton. She got a JD MBA from Georgetown. And when she got out of school, she didn’t really know what to do about her taxes. She didn’t know how to pick a healthcare plan. No one had ever really taught her that.

So, she’s got this really great platform that universities all of the United States are embracing and putting their kids through — to teach them how to go into adulthood. I mean, who would thing we’d have to disrupt that industry?

Good idea, but it’s a shame it’s needed. It’s silly that we don’t provide these tools in high school. Add in technology basics (backups, privacy, etc.) and it sounds a lot like Home Economics 2.0.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQYzsiVscNg

I love seeing Microsoft spend the big bucks on such a meaningful product.

OK. Back to cutting onions.

A blockbuster holiday. Lowered expectations. Three pillars of business. Nintendo’s recent earnings report was interesting if nothing else.

Brian Crecente at Variety gave a tight business side recap:

Despite a strong holiday, Nintendo on Thursday lowered how many Nintendo Switch it believes it can sell for the fiscal year, dropping the goal by three million, down to a new target of 17 million, the company announced in its latest earnings report.

The company also increased its Nintendo Switch game sales forecast by 10 million, saying it will sell 110 million copies of games for the system in the fiscal year, which ends in March. Finally, the company nearly halved its estimates for the sales of the portable 3DS systems, down from 4 million to 2.6 million.

The following are pulled from the presentation:

On Switch sales:

And cumulative global sell-through, including sales outside of the major markets you saw on the previous slides, has surpassed 30 million units as of the end of January, and the Nintendo Switch business is on a trajectory for further growth. Also, all of the new titles released in succession during the holiday season also showed exceptional sales.

Comparison to PS4 and Xbox One sell-through looks like this:

Comparison to the Nintendo 3DS looks like this:

On games:

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has achieved a sell-through of over 10 million units. The title has continued to show explosive growth after its release, with the fastest start for any title on any Nintendo home console ever.

Right in-line with NPD’s numbers.

Continued:

This chart shows the combined sell-through in Japan, the US, and Europe since April of 2018 for the four titles you see here. All four were released in the year before last, 2017. Sell-through of each title continued at a reasonable pace, then spiked upward toward the end of the year. As the spread of Nintendo Switch progresses, the number of new consumers is increasing. And to consumers who just purchased Nintendo Switch hardware, every existing title seems new.

One of Nintendo’s strengths is how easy it is for consumers with past experience playing Nintendo games to become interested in new Nintendo-brand titles. And if the steady sales of our evergreen titles can reliably support our overall software sales, we believe that will help fill any gaps between releases of new titles.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the top selling title for the Nintendo Switch at 15.02 million units. Super Mario Odyssey is second at 13.76 million units. I still wouldn’t call Mario Kart 8 Deluxe a system seller, but certainly a must-have. Electrodome Boogaloo, indeed.

On third-party titles:

Titles from other software publishers are also seeing a steady rise alongside Nintendo Switch. Nintendo’s revenue related to software from other software publishers was more than twofold during April through December of 2018.

The idea that Microsoft would put games on Switch doesn’t seem so crazy.

On strategy:

Based on our basic strategy, we’ve organized the company’s initiatives into three pillars of business. The three pillars are the dedicated video game platform business, the mobile business, and the IP expansion business.

Each pillar has a different purpose and a different scale. They are each considered critical to the company, and we intend to grow them according to their unique traits and potential for growth. Let me explain each of these businesses in order.

Executives have made mention of IP expansion, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it as core a pillar spelled out next to “video games”.

Ben Kuchera, writing for Polygon:

The good news for players is that everyone wants their business, and the battle for that business is structured in such a way that prices are going down, while profits — at least, in some cases — may be going up. Epic Games has found a way to get players to more closely consider the economics of storefronts, and it did so with both exclusives and a lower price. This won’t be the last time we see this approach as the platform wars continue in 2019.

I nearly titled my piece Activision, Microsoft, and Platforms “Platform Wars”.

Chris Kohler, Kotaku:

NPD didn’t release the exact sales number for Smash, but it gave us enough to roughly figure it out. It said that Ultimate exceeded the launch month sales of Super Smash Bros. Brawl by over 70 percent. Since that number is known (2.7 million), we can add 70 percent to it to get rough first-month sales for Ultimate at a little over 4.5 million units—again, not counting download sales.

In fact, Ultimate’s debut was, NPD said, the best launch month for a console-exclusive game in “video game history.” The strength of the Switch overall also boosted the sales of its major games, sending 2017 games Mario Kart 8, Breath of the Wild, and Super Mario Odyssey into 2018’s top 20. Overall, NPD said, Nintendo made more money on software than any other publisher this year, a feat it hadn’t achieved since—you guessed it—the salad days of Wii, in 2009.

Back-to-back big years?