Coming off the disappointing sales and response to the Wii U; Nintendo found themselves at a crossroad. The resulting Nintendo Switch has been a big success for Nintendo with currently 10 million units sold and growing.
As we wrap up 2017, we will look at what Nintendo did right and wrong this year and look ahead to 2018 for the company.
Nintendo overcame supply shortages and lack of new titles early as one of the biggest complaints about the system was a lack of titles at launch. Many of the early titles were older titles which had been released for the Switch and aside from Zelda, many fans had to wait for the big guns such as Splatoon 2 and Super Mario Odyssey to arrive.
While this was fine for hardcore Nintendo fans, others wanted more titles to play on the system and had to be patient for the multitude of titles in production to become available.
While Nintendo brought the fun back to fans with a versatile system and solid base of titles their biggest success is getting third party developers back on the system. This is both a good and bad as far as I am concerned and will vary depending on who you ask. Getting Bethesda to make DOOM for the system and rumored to be adapting the latest Wolfenstein game is a huge plus for Nintendo. Now the fact that the games are operating at a lower frame rate and graphical standard than their peers can be divisive to gamers. Some will say that having the games on a mobile system is a huge achievement and others will say that the lowered gameplay reduces the overall game experience.
It should be noted that Nintendo still has work to do as EA Star Wars Battlefront 2, Call of Duty: World War 2, Assassin’s Creed: Origin’s and many other of the year’s best and more popular AAA titles are not available for the system so this is something that Nintendo has to work on as they are forcing fans to own other systems (as many do) in order to play the full range of releases.
Nintendo knows that their core audience is not as obsessed with graphics, framerates, and online play and have focused on crafting games that will appeal to that base while introducing more online options as well as more mature games compared to what they have done in the past. Truly offering something for everyone; as I have really enjoyed seeing games like L.A. Noire remastered as well as some impressive releases in the past few months.
Going forward Nintendo will need to continue to release quality exclusives and keep the pressure on developers to make games for their system and above all remember the fun.
