ColdFusion - Nintendo Switch Breaks Sales Records at Nintendo! What Does This Mean?

Starting point is 00:00:00 You are watching Cold Fusion TV. Hi and welcome to another Cold Fusion video. I love innovation and I think it's great when companies take a risk in a mature industry and have a successful outcome. The Nintendo Switch is seeming to be one of those stories. In this quick video, we'll see what's going on. Nintendo was a powerhouse of home and portable gaming in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. They had smash hits with the Nintendo Entertainment System, N64 and Game Boy Series, respectively.

Starting point is 00:00:38 The company provided endless hours of entertainment for millions around the globe, but recently things haven't been as bright. After the release of the original Wii console, they've been struggling to find their groove until 2017, that is. In recent months, it looks like they've found the perfect formula, the Nintendo Switch, a mobile gaming unit that turned into a full home console in one seamless experience. Released in March of 2017, the Nintendo Switch has become the fastest-selling gaming system in Nintendo's history. The company sold 9606,000 units in the month of March in the US,

Starting point is 00:01:16 and the Japanese market bought more than half a million devices in that same period. All of this was a new record for Nintendo. Strangely enough, the biggest hurdle to selling even more switch units was Nintendo's ability to manufacture the device. According to one spokesperson, shipments have not yet been able to keep up with such high demand. In response, the company recently announced plans to double production. This will mean an additional 8 million Switch systems to be manufactured by April of 2018. The Switch isn't the fastest selling console of all time though, that title belongs to the PlayStation 4. Launched in November of 2013, 4 million units were already sold by December of that year. But to Nintendo's credit,

Starting point is 00:02:00 the switch was launched at a very odd time, in March, well before the holiday season, putting it at a disadvantage. So what's the technology behind the Nintendo Switch and how are they able to fit a game console in such a small form factor? The secret is what appears to be a modified NVIDIA TeGRA X1 chip. I use the word appears because Nintendo hasn't given the official word of what chip they're using, but the people that have tear down the device say that the chip looks the same as a Tegra X1 chip. The X1 chip has 256 graphics cores and uses something called a Maxwell architecture,

Starting point is 00:02:34 which is also found in Nvidia's desktop graphics cards. This architecture is designed from the ground up to be powerful, scalable and power efficient. In a video that I did back in 2014, I talked about the previous generation of the Maxwell architecture and got a bit of a hard time from people when I said that this would be part of the future of gaming. It obviously goes without saying that PCs and high-end consoles are still much more powerful. The bottom line is that for the first time, all platforms can share a common game engine. It's very reasonable to think that mobile technology will never get up to the graphics standards

Starting point is 00:03:10 of PCs and modern game consoles, but this attitude is quite reminiscent of those that said that the motor car will never overtake the horse and carriage. Saying never means that there's a 0% chance of that event happening, and that's probably not the smartest thing to say in this situation. Right now, we're at the very infancy of mobile computing. What we have today will be looked at in the future as the first pioneering steps, perhaps to convergence or perhaps to something else. And just think, in 2015, if

Starting point is 00:03:40 If this mobile graphics power doubles, which is the prediction, a lot of people might have to accept the fact that next generation mobile has arrived. So what do these rapid sales show? It shows that the consumer has an appetite for something new, the gaming console reimagined. It also shows that if done correctly, there's a huge market for truly portable gaming consoles. Though, with all of that being said, it's not just about the hardware. The games had to be strong too, or else the hardware is pretty much useless. This is where Nvidia's own shield tablet fell short.

Starting point is 00:04:16 The gaming strength of the Switch came in the form of just one game, Zelda Breath of the Wild. With 1.3 million copies being sold and 925,000 of them being on the Switch, this Zelda title is the fastest selling Nintendo launch in its 127 year history. More people bought the game than the actual console. The reason for why this is is still debated, but regardless, a 100% attach rate is crazy and pretty much unheard of. To put this all into perspective for Nintendo, the only real case where something similar happened was back in 1996 when the company released the iconic Nintendo 64. It sold 350,000 units in the opening weekend, which stalled out to about half a million by the first four months.

Starting point is 00:04:59 This is while its partner title, Super Mario 64, reached the 300,000 mark. Investors are happy about the Switch 2. Nintendo shares have risen more than 5% as of Friday the 14th of April. But as most of us know, the stock markets are very twitchy these days and don't really mean a whole much anymore. But it's still somewhat of a positive sign in regards to the brand perception of Nintendo. It hasn't all been smooth sailing for the Japanese firm though. There's been complaints of bill quality issues with the switch, including the warping of the units, scratch screens when putting the system into a dock to enable the console mode,

Starting point is 00:05:37 and some controllers have said to have trouble connecting. Hopefully most of this will get resolved as manufacturing scales up. So all in all, I really like a story like this, and this is good to see. The Nintendo Switch is truly a new type of console, and it's great to see a company like Nintendo take this kind of risk and have it pay off seemingly in a big way. Obviously it's too early to call this gamble as being out of the woods 100%, but it's definitely a good start. And if the Switch gets more solid gaming titles, things can only get better for Nintendo and

Starting point is 00:06:06 the consumer. Anyway, that was just a quick little video about the Switch breaking Nintendo sales records. Thanks for watching guys. feel free to subscribe to this channel if you just stumbled across it. And of course, I'll catch you guys again soon for the next video. Cheers, guys. Have a good one. Old Fusion. It's new thinking.

ColdFusion - Nintendo Switch Breaks Sales Records at Nintendo! What Does This Mean?

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