Nintendo Switch Has "Revived" The Games Market, Says Kadokawa President

Isn't Kadokawa a comic book distributor? Do they also program and publish games?

Nice, but we need more kadokawa full game guides.

@MaxlRoseGNR They are a book publisher. I think Kadokawa Games is a subsidiary that publishes games.

That's what can happen when you release a console that grants more people more time to play games.

Although I'm not sure where DualShockers got the data on Japan being "dominated" by a console that has taken years to outsell Vita in Japan.

Wishful thinking? I'm not too familiar with their output, but going by Wikipedia list, ports of Lunar games, Lollipop Chainsaw, Earth Seeker and even Demon Gaze (it IS on Vita already, but hey) would be nice. Especially Earth Seeker and Lollipop Chainsaw, yet two more games that have been stuck on Gen 7 consoles for years. Earth Seeker hasn't even gone westward to date.

The 'revived' part came from the question, not from their answer originally. It doesn't seem right to put it in the headline when the question was very guided.

Last year I mentioned on Push Square (which went down incredibly well!), when Sony was publishing far better than predicted numbers, that Nintendo had given a shot in the arm to the whole games industry and you could attribute at least a small part of PS4's unexpected best ever year to the overwhelming positive gaming vibes that the Switch had generated. Nobody was having it!

People have been saying console games are on their way out since I was a kid. 20 years later Nintendo and Sony are still selling millions of units every year.

The market is changing, but it's not, nor was it at any point in the last 30 years, dying. Nintendo did save it after the crash back in the 80s, but since then, it's only really grown and evolved.

@Heavyarms55 Yeah, it's basically just went from strength to strength--which makes me very happy.

I must admit the sheer deluge of quality Japanese games making their way to the Switch is quite heartening, especially RPG’s, a genre that Nintendo has been starved of since the SNES.

Competition makes a healthy market. I'm just glad we have the diversity we do among the consoles.

It's awkward for a reporter to make a question of 10 lines full of guided information and personal conclusions. That's not exactly how a question is being made.

loved God Wars on VITA. They done tons of updates and fixed the game up for the Switch version. Lots of voice acting (japanese tracks as a download), anime cut scenes and missions.

Worth a look if into old school sRPG.

More the point Nintendo has an outlet for indies and mid sized titles. I know I would never have bought Steamworld Dig Heist or Ys Viii for my PS4, but I did for my Switch. And it's opened up a world of games far more exciting than Assassin's Creed and COD.

"Until a couple of years ago, PS4 was pretty much the dominating platform in the Japanese market."

Uhm...
PS4 Sales (Japan): 7.12M
3DS Sales (Japan): 24.27M

Yes, DualShockers, it was the PS4 dominating in Japan until Switch launched.....

"Nintendo Switch Has "Revived" The Games Market, Says Kadokawa President" - clickbait title omits "in Japan."

PS4 (and XBO to a lesser extent) continues to be wildly successful in the West

@roboshort @Patrick-Sukiyaki Kadakowa is one of those multimedia corporations, books, movies, tv, games, and real estate somehow, that has bought up a few other companies. My wife works for them in New York so I looked into them recently.

@Cosats That was the most leading, and rambling, question, I've ever read. While reading it all I could think was PS4 was never that big in Japan, 3DS was, and Switch is the powerful 3DS successor in Japan so of course it's selling well there. Heck the Vita has been selling almost as well as the PS4 Pro in Japan since Pro launched and Vita has been dead for 2 years. It wasn't a question, it was an erroneous leading observation.

This article does seem to be about Japan, and Switch isn't really doing anything there that a 4DS with TV out wouldn't have done, b/c in Japan that's what it is, the next handheld console with the advantage of having tv out.

How many Switch games have sold $750 million in 3 days like RDR2? Or as much as God of War or Spiderman this year? Switch may be the next big handheld gaming system in Japan but let's not get too carried away just yet, Gen 9 is still young.

Edit: fixed half a dozen typos, too early for me.

@rjejr Well, I couldn't agree more. You said it better than me.

I hope they port Grasshopper's Killer Is Dead, that was pretty much their best game since Killer7 and it's very underrated.

God wars is so mich fun!

@RadioHedgeFund I dunno, I think the DS was another strong RPG machine.

@Damo Did...did they ask him about bringing Langrisser 1&2 to the west? (I think those guys are responsible for the remake)

@Totaldude911 The GBA has a ton of great ones as well. I guess I’m thinking more of home consoles. The Cube had Arcadia and Symphonia. The Wii had Xenoblade and the Last Story, although that’s a bit unfair because they both came out at the 11th hour and are pretty much the 2 best JRPGs ever made. The WiiU had Xenoblade X...

But the Switch has had TWEWY, Xenoblade 2, Final Fantasy 7, 9, 10 and 12 next year, Valkyria Chronicles, Vesperia due soon, Octopath, Satsuma, Ys 8 and glob knows what I’ve forgotten about. It’s a good time to be a JRPG fan!

Sony survives because the same makers make for both Switch and PS that the only reason Sony PS survives but if they went all out Switch I doubt Sony would be where they are now. Sony should thank Nintendo publicly for boosting the gaming scene again.

@RadioHedgeFund Here we go again making lame excuses the Switch doesn't have enough games. Are we so attached to alternative-facts that we can't see beyond the end of our noses here. Game ports and development isn't a overnight venture.

@rjejr To be fair I'm not really sure RDR2 ought to have sold 750M in 3 days. It's a great experience and does many things right and some big things very wrong, but that's a case of 3 years of heavy marketing making a game sell out before anybody actually knows what it even is rather than a game selling because everyone actually wants what it is. They didn't even present it at E3 and it still dominated, and reviews were embargoed until launch. It's a pretty good game, a pretty amazing world, but that's not why people bought it, they bought it because they were told they're supposed to want to buy it.

Nintendo just throws it on shelves and hopes someone locates it

@Cosats Thanks, appreciate it.

@NEStalgia "they were told they're supposed to want to buy it."

But that's how marketing is supposed to work. Something Ntinedo found out the hard way with Wii U and the easy way with Switch. How many comments have you read on here about people who bought a Switch last year but were hardly using it this year? We bought it on faith, of days to come, like Pikmin 4, that we're still waiting for. Marketing is everything.

Somebody writing an article next year about the videogame market being "revived" in 2018 is more likely to be focusing on Spidey and RDR2 than the Switch. In Japan Switch is important, but it's a small part of the world. If Japan was representative of the world we'd all be playing massage games on our Vitas.

@SwitchForce Er, I was commenting on the deluge of quality JRPGs the Switch has! Ports or not, the Switch has too many games to play!

@rjejr That's how marketing is supposed to work, but some things have too good a marketing campaign. They oversell a product to the point that when the real product inevitably disappoints, it creates a negative effect. RDR2 is going through that with the control issues right now. Yeah, they hype had everyone preorder twice over 3 years expecting some revolutionary, radical, transformative experience. What they got was a game with wonky, ill conceived controls, and outdated gunplay. The fact that criticism of a rockstar game is common online tells us how overblown the marketing was. I'm liking the game, but I never bought the hype, so my expectations were in check. Many people's weren't.

Well the "I'm not using my Switch this year" thing is a bizarre reaction from multi-platform owners. There's plenty of great content on Switch, it's just the multi-platform people complaining they already played X and can get Y cheaper, etc. The marketing didn't exaggerate Switch, it's everything promised and more, unless you're an internet complainer that either wanted it to be a PS4 or wanted 2 Zelda games a month.

Speaking of marketing, how bad do you have to be at marketing to not be able to sell massage games in any part of the world?

@NEStalgia You can't use 3 in 1 one post, you'll break something.

@RadioHedgeFund there should be distinction when saying things like that causes alot misleading statements have been tossed around like the Switch doesn't have any good games. That is getting old now days and overused.

it never needed a revive to start with. games are doing just fine

Switch is a great platform for indies, and I'm glad a number of them have found success there as well. I have Steam, but I'm not much motivated to search through it to find good games, and from there I wish I had a standardized controller to play with, and wish I didn't have to be tied to the computer to play it

@electrolite77 Agreed. Just pointing out that this article is factually wrong

@electrolite77 "brutally clear"

I think it's less about what the message has been, or even that they have one, t's just that the Switch has tv commercials and ads and Wii U never did. Nintneod thought Wii was such a huge seller all they had to do was add a U to the end and people would rush out to buy it without even having ever heard it existed. There are probably still people who know about the Wii but not Wi U.

But b/c nobody did, they needed to spend a ton of money marketing Switch to make sure it didn't fail like Wii U.

Of course it helped that it had Zelda BotW as a launch title, a little better game than Ntinedo Land /s and they could market one machine as two - it's a handheld in Japan and a home console in the US, or a portable console with tv out if you want, or a home console you can take with you. Which to me is the opposite of "brutally clear", it muddies the waters, but marketing is about muddying the waters and getting as many people as possible to buy it. Being "brutally clear" would be telling the truth - it's too big and expensive to be a portable and too underpowered to be a next gen home console - and you aren't going to get very many sales that way.

So they just marketed the heck out of it and let everybody decide what it is for themselves. Let the fanbois debate whether it's a tablet, handheld with tv out, or a home console that's portable, meanwhile sell as many as they can by putting Zelda and a bunch of Wii U ports on it.

B/c seriously, if the games are selling the Switch than the Wii U should have sold as well, b/c Wii U has Splatoon, MK8, SSB4, Pokken Tournament, Zelda BotW, Captain Toad, NSMBU, Hyrule Warriors and a bunch of other games like Super Mario Maker. Wii U should have sold if Ntineod just had tv commercials for the games and didn't shout "asynchronous gameplay" all over the place. Nintendo was being "brutally clear" about their marketing ploy and how they wanted people to play on Wii U, people just either didn't want it or couldn't understand it. So for Switch they muddied the waters and advertised it 100x more.

@electrolite77 Your right about the Switch not being any bigger than a tablet, I'm typing this on a 7" tablet right now, so it's portable for adults, but I still think it's too big to be a 3DS replacement for kids, and I think we'll see the true portable Switch in a year or two. Not so sure about a Switch home console, though I'd like one.

I still think Wii U would have sold better with some marketing. Not as much as Switch, it was still selling alongside the 3DS, but Nintendo hardly spent any money on it, I can't recall any ads until SMM, and it was obviously too late by then. Switch does have the advantage if all of those games in 18 months but Wii U should have sold with them, but there were too many Animal Crossing amiibo Festival mistakes.

Of course I still think Wii U was a mistake, it was a console without a game, and they would have been much better off with a $250 Wii HD or Wii2, without the Gamepad, then sell the Gamepad as a $90 controller 2 years later when the games came. It's what they did with $250 Wii and the $90 balance board 2 years later. That stupid board sold about 30million last time I checked. How would Wii have sold $350 at launch bundled with the board? Stupid idea right? Gamepad bundled with Nintendo Land, with upcoming Starfox Zero and Super Mario Maker and XCX and the Zelda remakes, it would have sold. Not as well as the balance board, but a $250 WiiHD with the first ever Mario in HD, NSMBHD, would have sold much better than Wii U. And like the N64 days they could have put HD at the end of every game, MKHD, SSBHD, ZeldaHD. I like to think that in retrospect they know this, and in another dimension that's the way it happened.

But Wii U still should have sold better, they just never tried. Wii U launched at $299, 4 years later it died at $299. That's not trying. 3DS launched at $249, a few months later it was $169, a 30% cut. That's how you try, that's why 3DS was eventually successful, they tried.