Nintendo announced their third-quarter earnings for the fiscal year to mixed reaction.

6.45 million 3DS units were sold (10% increase YoY), driven by strong Pokémon Sun and Moon performance with 14.69 million units sold. In a press release, Nintendo points to the popularity of Pokémon GO as helping boost sales of Pokémon Sun and Moon, as well as boost hardware sales outside of Japan.

I’m fairly shocked by the 3DS numbers. The six year old, 240p handheld apparently still has legs amongst the massive mobile market. While I’d say that may be good news for the Switch, a “home” console that’s performance seemingly can’t match that of the PS4 or Xbox One, the 3DS starts at half the price of the Switch, $150 sliding up to $199 for an XL, and boasts a 1000+ game library¹.

I know the Switch is marketed as a home console, but I can’t help but see it as a great handheld. With that perspective, and a guess that the Switch will see a price drop and bundle by holiday, it’ll still have a way to go before challenging the 3DS.

The highly anticipated and advertised Super Mario Run only converted approximately 5% of it’s 78 million downloads—about 4 million paid transactions. For a fantastic game, 4 million feels below my assumed “core” Nintendo base numbers.

Needless to say, 78 million iOS-only downloads is a lot of Mario icons on pocket computers at one time or another. This fits nicely with Nintendo’s renewed focus of ”interacting with [Nintendo IP] every day.” And that’s just iOS. Android will see Super Mario Run in March this year.

Overall, Thomas Whitehead of Nintendo Life captured my feelings about the results quite nicely:

The most recent financial reports can fit whatever agenda you want. They can be construed as worrying and a sign of a company in difficult times, or interpreted as a demonstration of Nintendo’s strength and positive prospects. There are numbers to support both sides of the argument - the reality is that they represent a company still in transition, modernising its approach, utilising and boosting successes, while also dealing with mistakes and failures. The 3DS thrives, the Wii U dies, revenues come for an app in which Nintendo had limited involvement, and all of this with Switch and more mobile games to come.

I remain very positive about Nintendo’s future. Their IP and first-party games can’t be beat and are appearing everywhere, while the Switch seems like the “dream” console, pre-orders of which are already difficult to come by.

This is easy for me to say. I adore Nintendo. I can’t say the same for younger generations who grew up along side Minecraft rather than Mario. Is the new “Nintendo IP every day” strategy too little too late, or did Big-N hold out just long enough?

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¹UPDATE: The 1,000+ number is a combination of all games de-duped by region and format. Seeing as the 3DS is region locked and a fairly slim amount of players would even attempt to play non-localized games, it’s not fair to say 1,000+ games.

Additionally, Polygon’s Brian Crecente stumbled across an interesting set of data in Nintendo’s earnings report:

Stuffed in amidst Nintendo’s quarterly earnings report was an interesting, updated look at the number of games released for every system going back to NIntendo’s first.

I grabbed the numbers, which are broken down into three regions for each platform, and built a little chart with them for easier comparison.

As Crecente mentions in his post, 85 games have already been announced for the unreleased Nintendo Switch— already over half of the Wii U’s US library. If the populous reclassifies the Switch as a handheld console which I imagine it will, the Switch has a big mountain to climb considering it’s home console development costs and Nintendo’s set-top game library trend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvCQQucF-Ak

Jose Otero, IGN, timestamp 3:11:

Outside of the tiny face buttons, the analog sticks, digital triggers, and shoulder buttons feel solid and well made.

The Joy-Con are surprisingly comfortable and versatile in the hand too. And attaching and detaching them from the console is satisfying to the point that it’s almost addictive.

I remember feeling satisfaction attaching and detaching Controller and Rumble Paks from the Nintendo 64 controller’s expansion port.

I can’t wait to get my hands on this thing.

Xavier Poix, Managing Director of Ubisoft’s French studios, in a corporate update interview on UbiBlog:

Is the Switch going to revolutionise the market like the Wii did?

XP: The Wii attracted a very large audience – including kids and families – because it offered, on one hand, the motion controls, allowing for intuitive interactions with the console and on the other hand games with a strong social component. These aspects gave us the opportunity to develop Rabbids and _Just Danc_e, for example. The Switch will probably have a similar impact, thanks to the mobility offered by the console. You don’t have to have a home console and a mobile console anymore; there’s one console, which is mobile, that you can bring anywhere.

Nice to see these comments, but that line-up doesn’t strike me as all to weighty. I see the value in the audience Ubisoft is targeting, especially after their experiences on the Wii and Wii U, but what of Ubisoft’s AAA games like Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Watch Dogs? How will those hold up on the Switch?

And has anyone reported on the Switch’s speakers? I can’t imagine Just Dance being a thrill in handheld mode.

Adi Robertson, The Verge:

The FBI appears to have made a serious investigation of some threats, but at least one email thread suggests there were breakdowns in communication with the subjects of them. “We feel like we are sending endless emails into the void with you,” complained one sender. Based on the timing and location details, this was Wu, who published her own account of the experience on the same day. Overall, at least one report indicates that centralizing the investigation in San Francisco limited its jurisdiction. It’s also not clear how familiar some of the FBI agents involved were with common internet services. Twitter is sometimes referred to as “Tweeter,” and one email mentions suspects using “Thor” (probably Tor) for security.

Via Twitter, Wu said that the threats the FBI discussed were only a fraction of the ones she sent them, and that the agency was largely unresponsive to her attempts to provide evidence. “All this report does for me is show how little the FBI cared about the investigation,” she told The Verge. “As I remember, we had three meetings with the FBI, we had two meetings with Homeland Security, we had three meetings with federal prosecutors in Boston. Almost nothing we told them is in this report.” She confirmed that the juvenile mentioned above had been making death threats using his father’s phone; he was apparently grounded as punishment.

This report was actually released as part of a Freedom of Information Act request last year, although at that point, it was difficult to verify whether the recipients had modified its contents. Since “Gamergate” was never really an organized movement, none of the people mentioned in the report are “members” of it, and some incidents predate the controversy, like a bomb threat against Anita Sarkeesian at the 2014 Game Developers Conference. But if anything, this emphasizes that Gamergate per se was one facet of a larger culture war — which it’s now been almost completely absorbed into.

I often wonder why it is I’m so fixated on video games and their culture. I initially started writing on the topic to help bridge what I felt was a chasm between “average joes” and “nerds”. These were worlds I strattled growing up, often hiding my adoration for video games because I was afraid to be uncool.

Later, after seeing my little brother and cousins take to the medium, I sought to bridge a chasm between parents and video games. I focused my writing on the health and education impacts of video games.

Today, in the midst of American uncertainty and woe, I wonder if thinking about video games anymore than escapism is worthwhile. Certainly, there are bigger things. But then I recall Gamergate; what I see as the first emergence of the “alt-right”. As Ezra Klein refered to it on his podcast episode with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, it was another moment of the merging of partisan and ideological identities:

Ezra Klein: I thought Gamergate was one of the most interesting things to happen in the last couple of years.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Because that had to do with politics, right? Like, why is this happening?

EK: Why did American political sites, Breitbart and Salon, develop an interest in an argument about whether video game sites were unduly influenced by some kind of personal relationship? When you say what happened out loud it sounds ridiculous.

TC: It’s hard to make it make sense.

EK: My big Rosetta Stone in American politics for the last 20 or 30 years is partisan and ideological identities merged: if you’re a Democrat, you’re a liberal; if you’re a Republican, you’re a conservative. That didn’t used to be true. Once that happened, it set the stage for all of these other identities to align: where you live, who you marry, what you think about 12 Years a Slave, what you think about video game fights on the internet. The stronger this sorting mechanism becomes, the more lethal the collisions between it become.

Video games span a hearty set of demographics. It’s a medium that has taken the entertainment industry by storm. And it’s a medium that enjoys a massive online community, many players of which partake in anonymity. As ideologies and interests merge, it is important foster an inclusive and understood community, especially a community that encompasses the majority of American households.

It is important to write and talk about video games—even in anonymity (looking at me)—possibly now more than ever. And it goes without saying that a large swath of current day writers, artists, and activists were raised on and are familiar with the medium and likely its communities, let alone Tweeter and Thor.

Keith Gluck, The Walt Disney Family Museum:

Then one day in 1932, Walt received a phone call from an affable fellow named Herman “Kay” Kamen, a Kansas City advertising man. He had a vision of putting a Disney character in every home in America. Intrigued by his energy, and already dissatisfied with his current deal, Walt invited Kamen out to California to hear his proposal. During the meeting, Walt and Roy quickly learned that not only did he have great ideas, but they were also all on the same page in terms of only allowing high quality merchandise to be stamped with the Disney name. On July 1, 1932, Kamen signed with Disney. The contract outlined a 50/50 split of the profits, a deal with which both sides were highly content.

Kamen wasted little time realizing his vision. Soon Mickey and Minnie could be found in department stores everywhere, adorning such products as: napkins, wallpaper, books, phonographs, all types of clothing, hairbrushes, toys, and much more. Mickey products extended beyond the store shelves as well, thanks to annual, then biennial, merchandise catalogs published by Kamen.

I thought Reggie Fils-Aimé’s comment sounded familar.