Bloomberg Businessweek: The Legend of Nintendo
More symptoms emerged in November, when the company released the NES Classic Edition, a miniaturized, rebooted version of the Nintendo Entertainment System, the console that had made the company a household name in Europe and America in the ’80s. The updated version was carefully calibrated to rekindle the latent passion of lapsed fans, with 30 of the most popular NES games built in. (Unlike the original, there were no cartridges.) From the start, supplies were scarce. Stores were constantly sold out, so customers lined up for hours to await shipments of even a few units. But what seemed to some like a supply-chain disaster looked to others like a calculated strategy. At $59.99 per unit with no additional games, NES Classics were a low-margin item; much more important for the company was to whet the world’s appetite for Nintendo games in preparation for the Switch. To that end, Nintendo and DeNA also released Super Mario Run for iOS and Android, giving hundreds of millions of people an opportunity to help Mario scamper across their smartphones or tablets.
The strategy worked. By the time the Switch arrived in the spring of 2017, legions of people had been enticed to reconnect with their favorite childhood game characters on a proper Nintendo device. Over the next fiscal year, the Switch accounted for $6.8 billion of revenue. Nintendo’s existing handheld platform, the 3DS, kicked in an additional $1.7 billion, and sales of smartphone games rose 62 percent, generating $354.9 million.
This is a fun write-up on the current state of Nintendo — from its headquarters to the injection of young talent to its now iconic business ebbs and flows. To toot my own horn, I think it works as a macro companion piece to my micro view in Big-N’s Big Year.
Needless to say, I’ll forever be tickled by major news outlets covering Nintendo and video games at large. It’s a no-brainer considering the size of the industry, but for someone who grew up in a time where video games were a niche, nerdy hobby, it’s extraordinary to watch a company like Nintendo become as culturally significant and observed as Disney.
(Link via MacStories)