For good and for bad, the video games industry is obsessed with novelty. New consoles, new technologies and, of course, new games are what drive headlines. So it’s easy to overlook one of gaming’s oldest companies and underestimate the sheer scale of its success. This month, Nintendo announced its quarterly financial results and said the Nintendo Switch is now the third bestselling games console of all time with 122.5m units sold, behind Sony’s PlayStation 2 (somewhere north of 155m) and Nintendo’s own DS (154m). As gamesindustry.biz journalist Christopher Dring pointed out, it has beaten the DS on software sales, selling almost a billion games (994m) compared to the DS’s 949m. A billion games!
Nintendo is an entertainment company, of course, but it is also a tech company – and surely one of the most successful tech companies around, both in its longevity and cultural impact, if not its absolute market value. Yet it has never behaved much like a tech company. The tech industry likes continuous disruption and unstoppable growth, whereas Nintendo likes experimenting with relatively modest hardware to get the most possible fun out of it. The company remains years behind on online gaming, where Microsoft’s Xbox took the lead. It stopped competing with the PlayStation on the technical specifications of its games consoles back in the 00s. Instead of joining the mobile gaming gold rush of the early 2010s, it waited until 2016 to release its first smartphone games in partnership with mobile developers – and was rewarded later that year with Pokémon Go.
