Switch Sports proves Nintendo’s extreme patience pays off

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In the mid-2000s, Wii Sports was the biggest game on the planet. If Activision, EA, or Ubisoft had published the minigame collection, we would have a dozen sequels and a reboot by this point — maybe an animated show on Nickelodeon, too. Wii Sports, for better or worse is a Nintendo franchise. Instead, we get one sequel, an remake and a decade worth of silence on the radio.

As a fan of the title, I was disappointed every time Nintendo completed a press conference or Nintendo Direct without mention of motion-controlled bowling. But as an editor who has covered this beat since the days of the Wii, I understood the business logic of it all. Nintendo is home to so many well-loved studios, they would be able to cannibalize one another if they got all the sequels they wanted.

So, I waited. And I waited. And I waited.

When the publisher revealed Nintendo Switch Sports in December last year, it was clear that I was losing hope. It was my assumption that Nintendo would produce another Pack-in for Switch if it wanted to use the Wii Sports model. I was wrong in every way.

As the Switch’s sales figures (and empty Target shelves) demonstrate, Nintendo did not need to include a game in its pack-in bundle in order to sell it. The success of the Switch could make Nintendo Switch Sports an even bigger hit than Wii Sports . Just this year, the Switch passed the Wii in total sales, zipping past 100 million units sold. The potential market for Nintendo Switch Sports seems enormous. And should Nintendo Switch Sports do the classic Nintendo game thing, amassing huge sales numbers over multiple years, then the game will keep the Switch relevant as it wades into the golden years of its hardware life cycle.

Once again, Nintendo has proven that patience is a virtue. We saw a similar situation last year with Metroid Dread, a project that had bounced in and out of development since 2005. Whether the publisher waits for the right moment to revive a series, or keeps a project in development hell, the end results are the same: a sustained quality that its peers haven’t matched (and likely never will).

Until recent times, “a delayed video game is eventually great, but a rush game is always bad” was incorrectly attributed to Shigeru Miyamoto, the Mario creator and icon. It’s much more likely, however, that the quote was just a common phrase across the games industry, the sort of aphorism that helps creatives push back the accounting team an extra month or two. I prefer the thought that Miyamoto didn’t coin the phrase, because that would mean that every major publisher in the games industry knows this mantra to be true. It has been a mantra that Nintendo only consistently lives by.

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