Switch Sports proves Nintendo’s extreme patience pays off

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The mid-2000s saw a shift in attitudes. Wii Sports It was the most popular game in the world. If Activision, EA, or Ubisoft had published the minigame collection, we would have a dozen sequels and a reboot by this point — maybe an animated show on Nickelodeon, too. Wii Sports, for better or worse is a Nintendo franchise. Instead, we get one sequel, a remake and a decade worth of silence on the radio.

Nintendo Direct and press conferences were disappointing for me as a Nintendo fan. I didn’t mention motion-controlled bowling at any of their Nintendo Direct or Nintendo Direct. As an editor, who covered the beat from the beginning of the Wii’s inception, I understand the business logic behind it all. Nintendo is home to so many beloved studios, they would be able to cannibalize one another if they got all the sequels they wanted.

So I waited. Und so I waited. So I waited.

The publisher made the announcement Nintendo Switch SportsLast year, it was all I could think of. I’d assumed that if Nintendo wanted to leverage the Wii Sports formula, it would have produced another pack-in for the Switch. In every aspect, I was incorrect.

As the sales numbers (and empty shelves at my local Target) show, Nintendo didn’t need a pack-in game to sell the Switch. Where? Wii Sports helped sell Nintendo Wiis, the Switch’s success has the potential to make Nintendo Switch Sports a colossal hit. The Switch has sold more than 100 million units since its launch in 2011, surpassing the Wii’s total sales. This is to say that the Switch has a huge potential audience. Nintendo Switch SportsThis is huge. It should. Nintendo Switch SportsIf you do the Nintendo Game thing: build huge sales figures over many years. This will help the Switch remain relevant in the final years of its hardware’s lifecycle.

Nintendo once again proved patience to be a virtue. Last year, we saw something similar with Nintendo. Metroid DreadThis was a project which had gone through several phases of development over the years. Whether the publisher waits for the right moment to revive a series, or keeps a project in development hell, the end results are the same: a sustained quality that its peers haven’t matched (and likely never will).

Until recently, the quote “a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad” was misattributed to Nintendo icon and Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto. It’s much more likely, however, that the quote was just a common phrase across the games industry, the sort of aphorism that helps creatives push back the accounting team an extra month or two. I prefer the thought that Miyamoto didn’t coin the phrase, because that would mean that every major publisher in the games industry knows this mantra to be true. This mantra has only been followed by Nintendo.

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