Nintendo’s handling of the reveal of the Nintendo Switch, their newest system, was certainly unusual. Unlike Microsoft and Sony, who announce their new hardware months, and sometimes years out in advance, Nintendo chose to mostly not acknowledge that the Switch (codenamed NX) existed at all. Until one fine day last week, they dropped tweet out of nowhere that they would be taking the wraps off of their system in less than half a day, and then proceeded to do just that, with… a YouTube video.
Yep, no grand conference, no stage show, nothing. It was a 3 minute long video. And yet, it was arguably the most effective way to handle the reveal. It got the world talking about Nintendo’s new system, and a week later, chatter about it has still not yet died down.
And according to study by ICO Partners, the Switch reveal also ended up being far more effective than the PS4 Pro or Xbox Scorpio announcements- which is surprising, because they both got grand stage show reveals, the latter even at E3.
1,311 websites covered the Switch in total, compared to a smaller 1,144 websites for the PS4 Pro, and only 834 for the Xbox Scorpio. Globally, across the board, interest in the Nintendo Switch was far higher than in Xbox Scorpio or PS4 Pro, and the same also held true across all types of websites. The PS4 Pro announcement did generate more articles than the Switch announcement (which still beat out the Scorpio on this metric handily)- but that’s probably because we know so little about the Switch relative to the Pro.
If this is any indication of anything, then, then Nintendo may have a winner on their hands here. All they need to do is ensure that they don’t screw it up somehow– such as by pricing it too high, or refusing to market it from here on out.