It wasn’t just the luck of a perfectly timed release that saw Nintendo prosper while the rest of the world was falling apart.
It’s safe to say that by now, we’re all heartily sick of this accursed pandemic, and are yearning – futilely – for it to somehow end, or at least fizzle out. But that may not be true for all of us – the video games industry has done extraordinarily well since Covid-19 took hold, with Nintendo, in particular, the latest company to post stunning quarterly figures.
It feels a tad callous to praise companies that have done well while the coronavirus has wreaked roughly as much economic as physical damage, but it would be churlish to begrudge Nintendo – which very much ploughs its own distinctive furrow – the plague-time success it has enjoyed.
Nintendo’s figures for the first quarter of 2020 included an operating profit of just over £1 billion – more than double forecasts – with digital game sales more than triple the amount for the equivalent quarter last year. Nintendo has now sold 61.44 million Switches (in reality, the Switch may already have overtaken the Super NES, which sold 61.91 million units). Animal Crossing: New Horizons has sold over 22 million copies, which is phenomenal.
It’s true that Nintendo benefitted from some outrageous good luck: Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the perfect, soothing and comforting lockdown game, was released on 20 March – almost the exact moment vast swathes of the planet were entering or had just entered virus-defying lockdown.
But it wasn’t just the propitiousness of that particular release date which enabled Nintendo to make hay while the rest of the world was crumbling. Imagine, say, if Animal Crossing: New Horizons had come out, in exactly the same scenario, but for the Wii U, rather than the Switch. Nintendo’s commitment to mass-appeal, family-friendly gaming, allied to the Switch’s brilliant conception and design, was what enabled it to capture the imagination of the locked-down world. The Switch proved to be the perfect gateway into gaming for those who previously hadn’t played games, or who had maybe drifted away from them.
In general, the games industry fared much better under lockdown than pretty much any other industry, and it’s obvious why – with significant proportions of the world’s workers furloughed, games provided one of the few means of escape and distraction.
But other games giants experienced slightly mixed fortunes while Covid-19 wreaked its havoc. Microsoft reported a relative 130 per cent surge in multiplayer gaming across the Xbox One and PC, and subscribers to its Game Pass passed the 10-million milestone. Sony enjoyed a game sales spike – up 83 per cent compared to the same quarter last year — with The Last of Us Part II starring towards the end of the lockdown. The company’s PlayStation division was the one shining star among what was otherwise a dire quarter for the company.
Twitch, Epic Games and Square Enix also did well during the pandemic. But it’s safe to say that Nintendo ended up as the overall star of the games industry during the sort of outbreak that is only usually depicted in video games. Let’s hope it is able to sustain that success – the recent announcement of a Switch port of the Wii U’s Pikmin 3, marvellous game though that is, has been seized on in some quarters as highlighting the paucity of original games due to land on the Switch in the near future.
At least now that Covid-19 has introduced the joys of the Switch to an audience which previously had no time for gaming, the Switch has a decent back-catalogue of games for such people to explore. Meanwhile, rumours of a new, more powerful Switch iteration persist. With the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 set to grab the headlines towards the end of the year, Nintendo could do with some attention-grabbing firepower of its own.
