With the Wii U only selling approximately 13 million units, Nintendo knows it has to work hard to reach a wider audience, whether that be the former Wii audience or gamers who haven't picked up a Big N game in years - hence the focus on Breath of the Wild during early TV spots. The New 2DS received the bulk of the marketing budget, but the Switch still wasn't left out.Īnd Nintendo needs these ads.
In July, for example, Nintendo led the way in advertisement budgets, featuring their commercials on channels like Nickelodeon and Adult Swim, during popular shows including SpongeBob Squarepants and American Dad. Nintendo also ensured these ads appeared in front of the right audiences as well.
Alongside a memorable reveal commercial, there are at the time of writing two other ad campaigns focusing on the system itself, both of which feature highly anticipated future releases and continually show off the system's primary function. From the system's first reveal trailer, Nintendo relentlessly pushed the system's core concept of playing anywhere. The Switch marketing campaign is, so far, completely different. However, that simultaneously places the blame back on the company for not making enough games that utilized the gamepad to begin with, so players were never forced to get used to it through consistent usage. It's easy to blame the consumer and say they should try to appreciate a new control scheme. Apart from Nintendo Land, most titles made no exceptional use of the gamepad when they did, as with Star Fox Zero or Kirby and the Rainbow Curse, consumers complained the controls and the overall idea were too complicated and that the game was mostly played on the gamepad, making the TV useless. Yet Nintendo's developers were also to blame. Even Shigeru Miyamoto said the company failed to differentiate it from other tablets and stand out as a game system. Nintendo addressed the gamepad problem on a few occasions in the past year, saying the public did not grasp the Wii U's core concept. You'd probably only need one hand to count the number of game commercials that Nintendo put out, with 2013's Super Mario 3D World being the main exception. Nintendo did pick up the marketing pace (much) later - but as others have noted, it was too little too late, and the ad campaigns didn't even try to push the Wii U's most distinguishing, divisive feature: the gamepad. To compound the problem, there wasn't much marketing for the Wii U's games either. Significantly, there wasn't much in the way of gameplay to show either (more on that later). The system's first ad was repetitive, showcasing very little that differentiated the Wii U from its predecessor, and mostly showing people watching someone else play. Nintendo's marketing campaign for the Wii U was, to say the least, dreadful, both in terms of television and Internet advertisement. On the contrary, the Switch console and how Nintendo has approached it proves that the company does, indeed, learn from its past and mistakes. But however much it might seem like Nintendo is conservative and never learning or making changes, that's not really the case. As a result, it's often assumed that Nintendo is completely out of touch with its audience and even with reality - an idea the Wii U didn't do much to dispel.
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