Jake Kazdal, an American video game developer who lives in Kyoto, Japan, spent a night in early
March refreshing the website of GameStop, the video game retail chain in the United States. He wanted to buy Nintendo’s just-released console, the Switch. But the device had already sold out in Japan, forcing him to look elsewhere.
While Mr. Kazdal had bought Nintendo’s previous console, the Wii U, a few years earlier, he soon had buyer’s remorse. “After a few short games at my folks’ place, everyone was done,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh.’”
The announcement of the Switch, however — a sort of two-in-one device that can be played at home or on the go — lowered his skepticism about Nintendo. Nine months later, his support is full-throated.
“It’s what the Wii U should have been,” he said.
Mr. Kazdal’s changing view on Nintendo is widely shared. This time last year, the company that made Mario and Donkey Kong household names seemed to have lost both its audience and its enchanted touch. Players were moving elsewhere. Losses were piling up.
But thanks largely to the arrival of the Switch in March, Nintendo has had a startling turnaround year.
Photo
The Switch comes with a small screen that can be attached directly to the controllers or remain separate and connect to a TV. Credit Christie hemm Klok for The New York Times
The new console became the fastest-selling video game system in Nintendo’s history — to the point where the company failed to keep up with demand. In Japan, thousands of people lined up this summer to enter a lottery for a chance to buy one. In the United States, retailers struggled, for much of the year, to maintain stock.
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Nintendo’s internal target for its first-year sales of the Switch has risen to 16 million from 10 million. In the company’s most recent quarterly report, released in October, it announced profit of $209 million, after regularly reporting losses in previous quarters. Its stock is up more than 75 percent this year.
“Neither analysts nor investors predicted the strength of adoption for the Switch,” says Piers Harding-Rolls, who leads a group of game industry analysts at IHS Markit, a research firm.
After years of resistance, Nintendo has also embraced the widespread move to mobile gaming that has reshaped the industry. Late last year, it introduced Super Mario Run, bringing the mustachioed plumber to the iPhone for the first time. Introducing new versions of some classic consoles, like the Super Nintendo, has also provided a revenue lift.
But the major reason for the company’s recent success has been its ability to identify and correct several problems with the Wii U, a console it released in 2012.
Third-party publishers made few games for the system, and Nintendo’s games, while lauded, were released infrequently, then not at all.
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The problems started with branding, however. The device’s name implied an iterative upgrade to the Wii, an earlier hit that popularized motion-sensing controllers, but the Wii U was a much different console.
The Wii U’s controller, which included an iPad-like screen that allowed for new game possibilities but also defied easy explanation, compounded the problem.
“It was a bit difficult for consumers to understand what the system was about,” said Shigeru Miyamoto, a top executive at the company and the creator of many of Nintendo’s most celebrated games during the past three decades.
Satoru Iwata, the company’s president when the Wii U was released, recognized these issues. Before his death in 2015, from complications related to cancer, he set in motion changes that have helped the company since.
Mr. Iwata pushed the company to refine the Wii U’s design for the Switch, rather than pivot from them. The Switch comes with a small screen that can be attached directly to the controllers or remain separate and connect to a TV. People can play the machine as a hand-held device or as a more traditional console. “It is truly portable,” Mr. Kazdal said.
Much of the marketing has focused on that versatility, an easy concept to convey. The console, Mr. Miyamoto said, combines “all of the different play styles we’ve explored through our products in the past.”
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