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Nintendo's Doug Bowser on Switch's library of titles, 3DS success, shipping 20 million Switch units this fiscal year, and more

by rawmeatcowboy
15 July 2018
GN Version 5.0


Nintendo of America’s head of sales and marketing, Doug Bowser, had some thoughts to share on Nintendo coming out of E3 2018. In the interview from GameDaily below, you can see Mr. Bowser talking about Switch's broad range of content, 3DS' staying power, Nintendo's plan to ship 20 million Switch units this fiscal year, and the negative stock market situation going on right now.

Switch's range of content

“It's been broad, it really has. You know, we like to say that we want to appeal to players from five to 95, but as we look at the Switch, it's been really balanced. Obviously, when you have a game like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, or some of the more core content, or mature content you may have mentioned, that's going to skew a bit older… But we're also seeing games like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe appealing to a very broad segment. We saw it with Kirby Star Allies, [which] actually [saw] a younger segment coming in and playing. So it really does vary by title.

Splatoon 2 is a great one that we have found is skewing much younger, and so our goal is, first of all, to have a gaming device that is going to appeal to a broad audience and we believe that, we're showing it downstairs [in our E3 booth], we really [are] kind of transforming how people think about play. It doesn't have to be a console experience or a handheld experience, it could be both, and that's really what we're continuing to stress.

And then the breadth of the games that we're showing right now help us address those different demographics. We're up to now, 700 titles in the first 15 months of release, and we just added an important one two days ago, with Fortnite. And [players] already downloaded two million of them; obviously it's the online phenomenon right now.”

3DS' continued success

“I can tell you right now [the overall 3DS business] is doing well. If you look at last holiday, we saw a real uptick at the end of the holiday season. We were up 27% on hardware year-over-year in the month of December. If you look at the first five months of this calendar year, so through May, we're up 10% on hardware, and attaching software at very nice rates, so we still see a strong potential for our handheld business. We're focusing right now on our 2DS, and our New 2DS XL lineup, because we believe those are great entry points.

If you think about a $79 2DS with a game installed or a $149 clamshell 2DS XL with a great screen, it's a more affordable entry point, and we have definitely found from a demographic standpoint, people that are coming in to those platforms and buying now, and then registering a Nintendo Account, they're skewing younger. So it's a wonderful way to bring them into our franchises. We've got over 1000 titles on the platform still, and we're announcing more. We've got Captain Toad coming to the platform, we've got more games coming in the latter half of the year and then the next year, we still have titles planned on the slate into 2019, and so we're going to continue to support the platform.”

Shipping 20 million Switch units in this fiscal year, and the current stock market situation

“What we're focused on really, is first of all, we've announced that we plan to ship 20 million units within our fiscal year. That still is our plan. And as we look at the engagement downstairs, we continue to believe that is a solid number.

I think what we're trying to do… Again, I can't speak to why markets react the way they do, why stock reacts the way it does. What I focus on is how to create awareness of our products, consideration of our products, and ultimately, purchase of our products. And things like this week really do help us get that message across, that we'll continue to market these products, but I think we've got some hits. If you go to Amazon right now, if you look at Amazon’s best-sellers, the top five best-sellers either have the name Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, or Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu, or Let's Go Eevee attached to them.

Out of all the content that has been announced and dated, those are the top five sellers right now, so I think we're doing what we need to do to continue to drive our business.”

[Link]