Shortly after a rough launch of its new service, information uncovered in a Nintendo corporate document shows the company may yet try to redeem itself with fans. In the document, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa provides business perspectives on financial performance and the company's plans going into 2022.
Following the release of the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack, Nintendo became the target of widespread criticism for charging extra on top of an already flawed service. Major problems with the quality of emulation for Nintendo 64 games, especially for the price point, drew backlash immediately.
The document summarizes Nintendo's financial data for the second quarter of the 2021 fiscal year and includes insight, however vague, into future Switch product plans. The Nintendo Switch Online service grew massively over the past year, with over 32 million accounts subscribing to the base service. Notably, the report does not mention the sales of the Expansion Pack; instead, the next point on the report states that the company plans to improve and expand both the base service and the expansion.
The Expansion Pack only released recently, adding obscurity to the reason why the sales numbers were not included, but with the major backlash over the Nintendo Switch Online's problems with both variants of the service, Nintendo's plans to improve may ease some fans' worries. However, Nintendo has a history of ignoring fan requests even with the original trailer for the base Nintendo Switch Online service being dislike-bombed upon release. Only time will tell if Nintendo will listen to the fans this time around.
For the Expansion Pack to be worth it compared to its competition, Nintendo may need to step up its game in a big way; while Xbox Game Pass allows access to a wide variety of modern games, Nintendo Switch Online's classic game collections may seem closer to an afterthought than an actual benefit. Even if the service does improve, however, it cannot fully repair the public relations firestorm that has consumed it for the past few weeks; the Nintendo 64 emulator even lacks basic features like button remapping, which is an especially big problem when combined with the strange default mappings.
On top of the new Nintendo 64 Bluetooth controllers selling out almost instantly, as is standard of gaming hardware this year, Nintendo has many problems to deal with at once. The company's main saving grace at this point appears to be the first-party exclusives; the business document includes impressive ongoing sales numbers even for some of the system's oldest games.
Source: IGN