David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…People on the Switch will buy 20-plus $60 games over the life of owning their Switch. This is not a casual ARPDAU-type audience. This is a high monetizing, high-intent audience. Finally, I think there is another element that we really got to give Nintendo credit for with the Switch that I and very few other people saw the potential in when they announced it, which is that the use case that they marketed, the primary use case of seamless playing between on-the-go and at home is actually pretty compelling. Legendary game director and designer, Hideo Kojima of the Metal Gear Solid franchise, was one of the few people, pre-launch, that publicly really recognized this. He has a quote. He says, "The fact that you can play something at home and take it outside, this is the gamers' dream. The Switch is an evolution of that." Before the switch, you really couldn't do this. Your same save stay, your same progress, your same everything. Exactly right. The other thing they got right with the Switch, which has been huge for them, both as a business and doesn't unlock for player dynamics, is they finally got online. This is a thing where people have been saying, oh, and Nintendo is always five years behind. I think Nintendo was 10 years behind in online play. This was literally their third attempt. They now finally have this thing called Nintendo Switch online. There are two versions of it. There's a $20 and a $60. But they finally have some semblance of an Xbox Live–type service that works. Before, I think they had the Nintendo Wi-Fi connection in the DS and Wii era, and that had some really weird sub things inside of it, the Wii Shop Channel, DSI shop, and they had this whole Friend Codes thing. They deprecated all of that, and they launched the Nintendo Network. Inside of that, they had the Nintendo eShop, and the eShop eventually got folded into Nintendo Switch online when that launched, but it has taken a long time and some pretty half-toe-in-the-water technology bets to get here. Famously, they launched Switch online. They said, it's great because it's peer-to-peer. Everyone was like, that's terrible for us. That's good for you because you don't have to build data centers, but it's slow and buggy. What do you mean it's peer to peer? Xbox Live has existed for eight years.…

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