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After the Switch 2 was revealed to be $450 along with the $80 Mario Kart World, the internet was overrun with cries to "drop the price." Nintendo, however, did not drop the price, and it's since been revealed that its new console sold 3.5 million units in its first four days, becoming the new fastest-selling hardware for the company. Now, though, two former Nintendo marketing leads say the company is essentially being taught "that they can continue to do this."
In the latest episode of the ex-Nintendo Minute hosts' podcast, Nintendo of America's former director of social media marketing and original content, Kit Ellis, and former senior manager of creator relations and original content, Krysta Yang, discuss some of the lessons the company is likely to have learned from the Switch 2's launch. They point to the backlash the Switch 2 faced for its pricing (as well as its game-key cards), with Ellis noting that Nintendo "made a decision that they were not going to engage on these topics."
This, he says, "is very much in line with what they have always done, which is just sit it out," rather than going for the opposite approach of responding but then getting stuck in an "endless cycle of like, you respond, people get mad, you respond again, people get more mad, and it's like what are we doing?"
Yang notes that "when we were inside the company working on the comms team," situations like this (not exclusive to launches) would "come up all the time," which would lead to "a discussion of like, what should the response be, and I'm telling you, 99.99999% of the time, the strategy is do not engage. Pretend it didn't happen."
Nintendo, Ellis says, knows "something about human nature which is not always a comfortable thing, but it is a true thing, which is if you just wait, most people will not be mad anymore."
Agreeing that the company doesn't seem to feel the "pressure" of having to respond to backlash, Yang chimes in: "They don't have, like, any human emotion. I'm not saying this to be mean or something, but it's like you're talking to a robot with no heart. [...] They are not human. They are like a faceless corporate robot. And so their response to you screaming on the internet and being mad is like, 'I don't care. This is not triggering any emotion in me at all, like I just will wait you out. And I know that I can wait you out, too.'"
As Ellis highlights that we've seen plenty of other examples before of people expecting that something is "'going to bomb because we're mad,' and then it doesn't bomb and it breaks a record," Yang says: "You're basically teaching them that they can continue to do this to you. [...] The thing is that this is not a good lesson to learn.
"Let's be clear that we're not advocating for Nintendo to be like a corporate monster," she adds, "because we did see this a lot from the inside and we would have like human emotions when people were mad, and sometimes we would be like, 'Oh man, I wish we would respond to these things,' but they won't."
Ellis agrees that "long-term aggravating your most passionate fans, it doesn't seem like a good thing to do, you probably shouldn't do that," even though the two say that actually arguing such a point within the company was easier said than done.
"They always had this other thing that they do that you can't argue against is 'the next thing that we do will make them happy again,'" Yang explains. "And you're like, 'you're probably right. The next game that you announce is probably going to [make people] happy again.'"
Concluding, Ellis says: "I just hope Nintendo does not go down that path of like, 'We're going to get away with whatever we can, we're going to squeeze as much money as we can.'" As Yang points out that "that's the lesson that they learned, though," Ellis warns: "This is gonna get ugly at some point."
While you're here, be sure to check out our Switch 2 review as well as our roundup of the best Switch 2 games.
