Nintendo On Maintaining Interest For Purchasers And A Switch vs. Wii Attach Rate Comparison

Nintendo had some more interesting data to share in its latest financial results briefing with some talk on future business plans and a look at how the Switch compares in title attach rate with the Wii.

Here are the details from company president Tatsumi Kimishima:

Nintendo Switch is now in a phase of expanding adoption, and our business focus moving forward must consider approaches for both those who have already purchased Nintendo Switch and those considering a purchase. A primary objective will be to maintain the interest of consumers who have already purchased Nintendo Switch to encourage their continued gameplay. And to further expand our base, it will be critical to see a wider range of consumers purchase Nintendo Switch.

We were able to offer multiple hit titles early on for Nintendo Switch that serve as powerful drivers for hardware sales. These kinds of titles can broaden the user base for the hardware and help sustain hardware sales. I mentioned the sales numbers for these different titles, but the release of multiple hit titles at the time of the launch of new hardware has significance beyond the mere fact that certain numbers of units were sold for individual titles.

Take a look at this graph. It charts the console attach rates for the top four Nintendo software titles for Nintendo Switch. For comparison, there is a graph for sales after the same amount of time had elapsed for Wii. Wii Sports was an explosive trigger for Wii sales. Wii Sports was bundled with the Wii console in the North American and European markets.

Graying out the bundled portion of Wii Sports sales yields the results shown. The blue remainder represents the ratio of stand-alone Wii Sports software sales to total hardware sales in Japan, the US, and Europe.

As you can see, there were multiple Nintendo software titles available early on for Nintendo Switch, with high attach rates. The expectation is that these software titles will drive hardware sales over the long term and will have long sales lives themselves as the hardware continues to sell. The presence of multiple popular titles for a game machine influences the purchasing decisions of people considering Nintendo Switch. And consumers who have already bought Nintendo Switch look at these popular titles as candidates for their second and third software purchases. This current state serves as a powerful booster for our hopes of further growth in Nintendo Switch sales in the medium term.