Market analysts are currently in awe as Nintendo continues to reap the benefits of its highly-successful Switch console. Some experts find it hard to fathom that the company was able to recover from its failure with the Wii U. The high demand for the hybrid game system has prompted them to push production numbers higher. However, it appears that it’s not enough as retailers continue to sell out their inventory as soon as they receive the restocks.
Meanwhile, their follow-up release of the SNES Classic Edition has also generated a great demand, which looks like a great year for the Japanese gaming giant.
Nintendo Switch a big improvement over the Wii U
Nintendo of America senior product marketing manager, Bill Trinen, claims that the biggest challenge for the company is “what is the demand gonna be?” It’s a fact that during the entire Lifetime of the Wii U, it only managed to sell close to 13 million units. On the other hand, the Nintendo Switch is closely approaching those numbers with an expected 10 million units sold by March 2018. “When you’re coming off the launch of the Wii U system, and then your next hardware system is the Switch, it’s a challenge to know how many we should be ordering,” said Trinen.
Based on the information, the company most likely failed to estimate the overwhelming demand.
Learning from their mistakes
Other experts believe that Nintendo properly adapted based on the mistakes they’ve made with the older console. One of those areas of improvement apparently deals with the overall experience during use. The senior product marketing manager claims that the time it took gamers to power on the console and start gameplay “was something that was a frustration for a lot of players early on.” For comparison, the Switch takes minimal time to boot up and start a game.
Inconsistent software release schedules
One of the biggest problems with the Wii U was the lack of third-party games and poorly scheduled release dates.
Nintendo credits their software release plans as one of the biggest factors the contributed to the Switch’s success. To keep consumers engaged, publishers have probably communicated with the company in order to plan out their release dates. According to the Japanese gaming giant, their goal is “to delight” their consumers. It looks like the firm plans to dominate the holidays with the release of the SNES Classic Edition and return of the NES Classic Edition.