Nintendo has achieved great heights in its few decades in the video game industry. Popularizing home consoles with the NES, introducing new audiences to games through the Wii’s motion controls, and the touchscreen Trojan horse that was the Nintendo DS, to name a few. But these successes were often followed by missteps; The Wii sold 100 million units, while its follow-up, the Wii U, couldn’t even garner a quarter of that. But that uncertainty seems to be changing. The Switch is now Nintendo’s best-selling console of all time, overtaking the DS with 155 million units sold since its debut in 2017. And in that period Nintendo has transformed itself into a company better insulated against the ever-changing desires of the game industry.
One of the major factors behind the Switch’s success was how it represented a more unified version of Nintendo. In 2013, the company merged its two main game development divisions, which were previously divided into home console and handheld groups. Given how the Switch straddled the line between console and handheld, this makes a lot of sense. But it also allowed Nintendo to put the full force of its creative resources onto a single platform. The result was a series of massive hits: games like mario kart 8 deluxe, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, super smash bros ultimate, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the WildAnd super mario odyssey Over 30 million copies were sold in all.
Just as importantly, this structure allowed Nintendo to consistently release big games over the Switch’s lifetime. Even as the focus shifted to the next console, the final years of the Switch still included brand new zelda And Super Mario game. The structure has allowed Nintendo to seamlessly continue this success into the Switch 2 launch, which started off with a very fast start and a brand new launch. Mario Kartwhich followed donkey Kong And Metroid.
But beyond the games that are the core of the company, Nintendo has also used the Switch’s success to constantly move in new directions. In 2023, super mario bros movie hit theaters, grossed over $1 billion, and now Nintendo has both a sequel and a live-action zelda Movie on the way. Nintendo opened its first theme park in Japan in 2021, and has since expanded to Hollywood and Florida, with its next location in Singapore. The company also opened its own museum in 2024. In short, Nintendo is building an entertainment empire. Apart from Xbox and PlayStation, its competition is also increasing from Disney and Netflix. “I think people see Nintendo as a gaming company,” Shinya Takahashi, Nintendo’s senior managing executive, told me in 2023. “But we’ve always thought of ourselves as an entertainment company.”
This isn’t an entirely unique strategy: almost every video game company is hoping to move into film and television after the success of their projects. the last of us, ControversyAnd a minecraft movie. But in Nintendo’s case, the company understands how uncertain a success like the Switch can be, and it used that success to build itself into something bigger in a deliberate, concrete way. This is something Nintendo has tried to do before – see: the company’s ill-fated attempts at mobile gaming – but its resurgence during the Switch era has allowed it to approach these ventures with a new level of focus and ambition. This is a company that is so confident that releasing a remake of the Virtual Boy for $100 is one of its biggest failures.
But the new Switch also doesn’t need to match the success of its predecessor — it just needs to allow Nintendo to continue this momentum.
<a href