Nintendo President Addresses Criticism Of Switch's ‘Weak’ Lineup Of Launch Titles

When the Nintendo Switch launches on March 3, it will only have at least 10 games available to play, and this has caused some negative feedback from fans. Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima responded to the criticism by defending the company’s strategy.

“Some of those who have seen this lineup have expressed the opinion that the launch lineup is weak,” Kimishima said during an earnings briefing this week, per GameSpot. “Our thinking in arranging the 2017 software lineup is that it is important to continue to provide titles regularly without long gaps. This encourages consumers to continue actively playing the system, maintains buzz, and spurs continues sales momentum for the Nintendo Switch.”

Nintendo will only be releasing two first-party titles for the Switch on March 3, “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” and “1-2 Switch.” It’s become apparent that the company is putting a lot of faith in “Breath of the Wild” as the game that would convince a lot of its long-time fans to buy the Switch on day one.

As for the long-term goal, Nintendo’s strategy is to keep pushing out games all throughout the year to avoid large gaps between releases. This appears to be the same strategy that the company did for the Wii U back in 2012, as pointed out by GameIndustry.biz.

“Nintendo tends to release too many titles at the launch of a hardware system and as a result suffers a drop in new games for quite some time after launch, and for the Wii U launch, we are being very careful not to let it happen,” Nintendo's Satoru Iwata said back in 2012.

What actually happened that year however was that Nintendo wasn’t able to stick to its release schedule as some games were delayed. The Wii U, and even the 3DS, suffered through a bit of a game drought in the process, according to Game Rant. Nintendo was only able to sell 13.56 million units of the Wii U in 2012.

Nintendo said that it currently has 70 developers working on more than 100 games for the Switch, according to Slash Gear. Other new first-party titles coming to the console this year include “Splatoon 2,” which is expected to be released this summer, and “Super Mario Odyssey” for the holiday season.