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December 12, 2018 1:30PM PT
Reggie Fils-Aime: Nintendo Switch Games Performing at 'Historic Levels'
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Software sales for the Nintendo Switch are performing at "historic levels" with the release of the company's fall lineup, Nintendo of America president and COO Reggie Fils-Aime told Forbes, citing "Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu!," "Let's Go, Eevee!" and "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate" as well as a big boost from holiday sales as the reason behind the platform's success at this point in the fiscal year.
"…[I]n terms of traditional attach rate, the Nintendo Switch is performing at historic levels," says Fils-Aime. "As we sit here today, 'Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild,' 'Mario Kart 8 Deluxe,' 'Super Mario Odyssey,' each one did attaching at better than 50%, meaning each of these games in the United States across the population of hardware consume one out of every two consumers that bought those games. And we've never seen 50% attach rates to begin with and seeing that across three different games coming up on to our second holiday is completely unheard of."
Last month's Black Friday sales also played a crucial role for the Nintendo Switch, with the platform experiencing a 115% sales bump over Black Friday weekend and Cyber Monday – resulting in an impressive $250 million in sales.
However, Nintendo is still faced with the challenge it set for itself at the start of the year: A goal of 20 million Switch units sold by fiscal 2018. The company currently has 15 million units to move and roughly six months left to meet this goal.
Even so Fils-Aime remains confident.
"We're feeling confident in our momentum and it's not just a stellar launch of Pokémon, it's not just what appears to be a stellar launch for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate," he says. "That Black Friday through Cyber Monday time frame was critically important to us, the remaining shopping days now through Christmas are critically important to us. More days right after Christmas as consumers receive gift cards or take unwanted gifts and monetize into things like Nintendo Switch are important to us. So, this is going to be an ongoing effort to make sure that we drive our business forward through the balance of this holiday season but also the first calendar quarter as well."
"…[T]he Nintendo Switch here in the United States is generating a level of revenue per piece of hardware that we've never seen in our history," says Fils-Aime, taking into account the overall software revenue Nintendo Switch is generating through DLC, indie games and other content. "And so our consumers are engaged, they're buying software, they're playing software, as long as we continue to do this, we're going to have a very vibrant platform which will continue to attract the very best from the big third-party developers as well as the smaller independent developers."
Reggie Fils-Aime
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