Despite its economic and entertainment growth over the last decade, China is still a market that remains closed off to many major companies due to multiple reasons, ranging from censorship to various other regulations that the Chinese government puts on anything entering the country. That’s why it was such huge news when it was announced that Nintendo and Chinese multimedia giant, Tencent, would be teaming up to bring the highly successful Switch to China. We haven’t really gotten any details on when that will be happening since that original announcement, but today we got a good idea that it could be coming soon.
As reported by GameLook and translated via Technode, Tencent is now recruiting for a “Nintendo co-operation” department as of the beginning of this month. This seems to indicate that the deal is moving forward, and it’s very likely that we’ll be seeing the Switch sold in China soon, perhaps even by year’s end.
It’s a big prospect for Nintendo, but as the current President of the company has warned, it’s not the first time the company has tried to break into the market- and last time didn’t go particularly well. While it’s a big boon on paper, whether or not the Nintendo brand will translate is a hard thing to gauge.
While there’s obviously a lot of crossover with Chinese culture (in things like Marvel, for instance), it’s still one that’s very isolated in many ways where other worldwide brands have done nothing compared to other parts of the world, with some prime examples being Star Wars or DC. Nintendo is flying pretty high with the Switch right now, but this might be the test to whether the hybrid ends up having the Midas touch or not.