Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aimé remains confident that the 20 million Switch sales target will be reached before the end of Nintendo’s current fiscal year.
Fils-Aimé recently sat down with Forbes to talk about Switch hardware and software sales, and it appears that, despite investors being skeptical, the Nintendo CEO still believes that the company will be able to sell 20 million Switch units in its current fiscal year which ends on March 31, 2019.
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“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”, Fils-Aimé told Forbes. “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.”
Nintendo managed to sell roughly 5 million Switch units through the first half of the current fiscal year, meaning another 15 million will need to be moved in just six months – quite the challenge considering that Nintendo sold around 10 million Switch units last holiday.
Aside from hardware sales, Fils-Aimé also had something to say about the Switch’s exceptional attach rate and revenue that it is generating.
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“So first, in terms of traditional attach rate, the Nintendo Switch is performing at historic levels”, he said. “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. Second thing I would say is that beyond the number of games attaching to a system, we’re looking at the overall software revenue that we’re generating, so now this starts to take into account DLC, it takes into account purchases of indie games and other content, and again, the 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. 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.”
Nintendo released the Switch back in March of last year and has been selling amazingly well ever since. Back in September of this year, Nintendo reported to have sold more than 22 million Switch units since its launch.
