Gaming expert Simon Carless has found out what the chances are of releasing a successful game on the Nintendo Switch in 2023. To do this, he analyzed the lists of the most downloaded games in the United States.
Carless took as an example the situation on the Nintendo Switch in May. He evaluated the lists with games on a specific date — May 21, 2023.
In May, only 41 games out of the top 300 by downloads were released in 2023. Two of them were free.
Ten new products got into the top 100, of which three were free.
If you look at the top 50, there were 20 free games, 13 Nintendo exclusives and 17 premium games from third-party studios, of which only one is new – Dokapon Kingdom: Connect.
▪️On average, about 200 games are released on the Nintendo Switch every month. Less than 10% of them fall into the top 300.
Games ranked 200th in the American top can count on about 5 thousand copies sold worldwide in 14 days. Games on the 100th place — 10 thousand copies sold.
▪️Only 4-5 games released on the Nintendo Switch in May 2023 have allegedly sold over 50,000 copies in a month. For comparison: there were 10-12 such games on Steam.
The situation was much better in 2018. Then Nintendo Switch was used by 32 million people, and 1,500 titles were available to them. Now the number of consoles sold exceeds 129 million, and the number of available games is 10 thousand.
It all comes down to the biggest problem of the Nintendo Switch — poor visibility of games. The platform lacks tools like recommendation lists like Steam Discovery Queue. But Carless doubts that Nintendo will change anything, since its exclusives already bring a good income.