The Switch 2 has gone perfectly for Nintendo, just not for fans – Reader’s Feature

With sales of the Switch 2 outpacing its predecessor, a reader argues that despite fan discontent there have been no mistakes from Nintendo’s perspective.

In theory, everything has gone perfectly for Nintendo when it comes to the Switch 2. Its two big games have reviewed well, and the console itself is outselling the Switch by a big margin. If Nintendo’s happy you would assume fans would be happy as well but I’m not sure they are. There’s this weird sense of unease about how things have been going, that a lot of my friends have mentioned and I’ve heard people online talk about too.

Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza are great, but they’re not as flawless as you’d expect from Nintendo. More worrying, all their smaller games so far have been bad, like Welcome Tour and Drag x Drive, and Kirby Air Riders and Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Imprisonment don’t seem any better.

The choices seem weird and everything seems rushed, even though Nintendo has had all the time in the world to get things ready. Drag x Drive wouldn’t even have been that bad a game necessarily, if it just had more options, but it doesn’t. And then there’s the whole question of why did it come out in June anyway, like it was trying to make some deadline that only Nintendo knew about it.

Then this week you had the weird story of Nintendo still not giving out devkits [the modified consoles needed to make games on the format – GC] to even big name developers. And the rumour that Nintendo was doing it on purpose, because they don’t want too many third party games coming out this year. Even though that doesn’t seem like it would benefit them at all and would definitely upset other publishers.

Everything is off, and while it’s far from a disaster it’s also nothing like I thought the Switch 2 would be, coming off a huge success and with no competition at all this year.

Then there’s other weird stuff, like the whole Donkey Kong costume thing in Mario Kart. If you don’t know he and Pauline only have one extra costume, while even the most obscure other character has at least three. An obvious sign there’s DLC coming, probably for the same time as Bananza, right? Wrong, we’ve not heard a single thing from Nintendo and there’s explanation at all.

There’s also no word on the next 3D Mario or anything that’s going to happen next year. Maybe the Nintendo Direct rumoured for next month will announce it but at this point I kind of doubt it – because that would make too much sense and nothing else Nintendo’s doing at the moment seems to.

And then I realised the problem is we’re looking at this from the position of fans and customers, but Nintendo is a business and I bet everything it’s doing makes sense to them from the position of making money.

Another thing people have been talking about is a ‘secret’ Christmas, but except for maybe some kind of retro release for the 40th of Super Mario Bros. I bet there isn’t one. Mario Kart and Donkey Kong are going to be big sellers for the next five years; they don’t need anything else.

Whatever’s going on with the Mario Kart costumes must be a long term plan, not something they’re going to reveal after a couple of months. They’re not in any rush to release any new games because these two will see by the boat load for years. And they don’t want too many third party games because they don’t want the competition.

Nintendo is running their business to make money and that’s all they care about, just like every other company. They might seem like the ‘nice ones’, because they make good games and treat their developers well but they’re not a charity and with a changing games industry they have to be cutthroat.

I don’t understand it all (how could I?) and I can only guess at why the June release (a combination of trying to avoid GTA 6 and not having enough Switch 1 games to last to Christmas?) but I guarantee all this makes a lot more sense to Nintendo than it does to us.

From their perspective there’s no sign that anything has gone wrong and the sales figures definitely don’t show anything has gone wrong. I’m not saying that to justify anything they do but just to say that we’re looking at this from the wrong angle.

I wish the Switch 2 launch had been more exciting but exciting isn’t what Nintendo wanted. They wanted profitable and it looks like that’s what they got.

By reader CColin

The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

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