In the Nintendo France teams, it is time for optimism after a successful year 2023. Although launched in 2017, its console, the Switch, continues to enjoy great success, we learned on Monday January 22. With 855,000 units sold during the year, the Japanese brand now boasts an installed base of 8 million machines.
“This exceeds our expectations”confides Philippe Lavoué, general manager of the brand for France, who emphasizes that this performance far exceeds that of the Wii (6.3 million in France, 100 million worldwide). “However, we said to ourselves that it would be difficult to do better”continues Mr. Lavoué.
On the games side, the lights are also largely green, since the Kyoto group claims 55% of physical sales in France. According to a ranking established by the GFK firm, Nintendo monopolizes the top three best-selling physical games in France in 2023, with two recent releases − The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (920,000 copies sold) and Super Mario Bros Wonder (750,000) − as well as a classic as old as the console: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (385,000).
Symbol of the strength of the licenses that the Kyoto group has managed to develop – and of which it retains exclusivity for its console -, 2023 was also the year of the success of Super Mario Bros.which spectators have placed at the top of the list of the most viewed films in France (7,359,264 admissions).
New models
Another testimony to the success of this strategy is the longevity of the commercial success of Nintendo games. The previous opus of Zelda, launched in 2017, is still in the top 20 best-selling games in the country. These licenses are also available in derivative products and even amusement parks in Japan, the United States and soon in Singapore.
Nintendo was also able to take advantage of the success of its console to attract ever more third-party publishers. Thus, almost half of the 214 million games sold on Switch worldwide in 2023 were not developed by the Japanese firm. A logical development, for Mr. Lavoué: “We have progressed in our attractiveness to third-party publishers, from the largest to independents, but, above all, the latter would be wrong not to benefit from an installed base of more than 130 million Switches worldwide. »
After the failure of the Wii U (13.5 million copies sold between 2012 and 2017), Nintendo bet big with the launch of the Switch, especially since it dared a concept of a hybrid model, between a home console and portable console. But there was immediate success. To keep the flame alive among consumers, two new models have been launched: the Switch Lite, less expensive but dedicated solely to mobility, and the Switch Oled, a premium version of the original model.
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