Analysts have actually estimated that Nintendo Switch is the market leader in China (I believe making up 45% of total console sales), so they seem to have done a good job considering the circumstances.
I know Nintendo is a company and they are going to try and get that big market but when I look at what happened to Hollywood I am not sure if the rest of the already established consumer market will benefit from an increased Chinese consumer presence…
I would like to see a video about Nintendo’s potential relationships with third party developers in the next console generation. A common talking point is that no one seriously buys third party games on Nintendo hardware. Clearly this isn’t true as the amount of third party support the Switch regularly gets implies that these developers are seeing incentive to make their games playable on Switch. And Nintendo benefits from third party games selling as they get a cut of that sales revenue.
I am reminded of a Guardian article I read about how Paradox Interactive (makers of strategy titles like Europa Universalis) went public partially to be able to get into the Chinese market via legal channels, yet it did not succeed, whereas Hazelight who made It Takes Two accepted that their sales would be entirely on the grey market and let Chinese streamers market their game where it turned into a hit.
I love your videos. It would be interesting to see more developer deep dives into companies heavily partnered and associated with Nintendo similar to what you did with Intelligent Systems. Some companies I would like to see are Game Freak, Creatures Inc., Hal Labs, Camelot, and Pokémon Company. It would be interesting if you did a video breaking down major Nintendo IP which IP rights are split with other companies and which ones are fully owned by Nintendo.
Thank you! I've done a couple of Camelot videos and I did a video last year ("Why Nintendo still ignores some franchises") which touched on IP rights splits. I will get round to Hal and Pokémon but there's such a lot to look through, it may be a while.
Restrictions on gaming is primarily concerned with online gaming. Parents are encouraged to limit the amount of game time students have during the school year. The limitations of selection is most likely a tencent issue not Nintendo. There’s also other barriers for the growth of consul gaming in China because third places are readily accessible and free. Culture around free time is just different. But seriously, they really need to get in South America especially Brazil. 🇧🇷
How do you come out with such wonderful videos with so much research and depth in such rapid succession?! Great job, friend! Amazing content! Loving your videos!
Hi, I wanted to add a bit about games' availability in China. You said that games like BOTW and Animal Crossing are not yet approved by the government. However, these games are being sold and are amongst the popular ones. I suppose tencent's real mission was to promote Nintendo. Most people buy games online, cartridges might be even more popular due to how easy it is to buy. And as far as I know, they were even pre-selling titles like new Pokémon games and Zelda TOTK. Great video nevertheless, very insightful!
Interesting - this info was from early on and I looked for confirmation on whether BotW had since released but couldn't find anything recent. Thanks for sharing!
3:49 the reason ACNH was not sold in China was because it actually got banned. The reason was that the game was being used to promote political stances relating to Hong Kong, which China consideres it's own territory but many people don't see it that way. So the game probably got banned so that people couldn't promote the "Free Hong Kong" movement and that. I'm not sure about why BOTW was not being sold, however. Probably because it didn't comply with Chinese video game rules and that.
I’ve seen a video of someone playing Animal Crossing on their Tencent Switch and it worked. Network features were completely broken though, the guy said he had to link a WeChat account to access it.
so i take it the "gray market" sales won't count as chinese sales but inflate the sales of other regions? the switch also didn't officially launch in my country, but most of my friends have one
The chinese ads for the Switch are great. How do some people think the Steam Deck compete with the Switch? It cannot do what the Switch shows in the ads.
switch is much more popular than steam deck in China. Ringfit adventures, animal crossing，Pokemon，Zelda were phenomenonal when they were released. BY comparison steam deck only attracts hardcore gamers rather than casual gamers. The first game console people i know bought likely to be nintendo switch.
Can anyone here explain more about gaming scene in China? From what i understand from this video, video games are being restricted by the government so does this means that gaming scene is not really great in China right now? How about pc gamers? Can they use steam/epic or any other pc game store there? 😅
there is steam china (the steam logo with a red tint) as one of the official ways to get desktop games, but does have a much more limited selection (there are 218 games on there) than steam international (55,596 games with Simplified Chinese) (the reason there are so few games on steam china is because every game on there has to get permission from the cn government itself so yeah) from what i remember steam (international) in china is a grey area where everyone uses it and banning it would cause more issues than it solves, and steam china isn't up to the task with replacing it yet (to few games). steam does block access to steamcommunity if your in mainland china (with out using a vpn), but everything else works like normal in china (for some stats, the amount of users using English is 32.5%, while Simplified Chinese is at 33.4%. the total amount of bandwidth used by users from mainland china (255.6 PB, 22.6% of global traffic) is equal to the bandwidth used by users from the US (243 PB, 21.4% of global traffic) the traffic data is from "steam download stats")
Chinese person here, the gaming market is great here, but mostly mobile. One of the highest grossing mobiles in the world is exclusively chinese actually, 王者荣耀 if you’re curious, it’s a moba. Legally there is a lot of restrictions, that’s why a lot of people choose to do it ‘illegally’, they’ll make steam accounts from other regions, or buy Nintendo switches imported from Hong Kong or Japan. The chinese versions of the switch and steam are notoriously ass so nobody uses them, that’s why the sales numbers are so tiny, but rest assured the market is huge. I’m pretty sure a lot of sales numbers for switches in those two places are mainland chinese lol, and if you see large numbers in weird countries like argentina or something then it’s 80% chinese gamers. Pc and consoles may not be as big as mobile games but rest assured the gaming scene in general is very great here. Console and pc gaming is more dominated by male audiences though, but the switch in particular has many female players. Animal crossing and Zelda are really big here. I think the boom of switch sales happened in covid when animal crossing released? That’s when me and probably a lot of people first became aware that it existed.
I know this sounds strange, but I was wondering what Nintendo's relationship with Sega is like, especially given that they don't have stock with Sammy.
because brazil doesn't matter to them. Which is only natural considering we left nintendo in the dust ever since the ps1-ps2 era because piracy wasn't as easy for the nintendo consoles and you could just buy pirated copies of PS games anywhere for cheap
Because almost everyone in Brazil pirates nintendo games and even if they were affordable, people would still pirate then, since we even pirate indie games of all things and the switch is exploitable for jailbreak/homebrew. Pirating nintendo games is almost a cultural thing to do in Brazil.
@@andreylucass despacitospider said it all, Portugal is too small of a market to consider translating for. Other game companies usually include brazilian portuguese support, but not european portuguese (portugal), exactly for this reason and since Brazil isn't really profitable for nintendo, it's not worth it to translate dialogue heavy games to brazilian portuguese.
I feel it might be better for nintendo to release a custom console instead, that loads only a few games... think of it as a NES & SNES mini, but for switch games. This way nintendo can make a quick buck in China, and focus more on the rest of the world.
No. Real reason consoles not go well except Japan is...Confucianism. Best example is South Korea. South Korea never banned any console and big electronics corporations even import consoles (Sega Genesis and Saturn are imported and marketed by Samsung) but not succeed well.....even now. Cultural differences are crucial factors that consoles are not working well in Asian market.
I'm baffled by even Nintendo's attempt to try selling it big in China. It's a very restrictive country whose administration has zero interest in gaming, and a unfortunate habit of ripping things off. If anything, Nintendo should've moved south a bit and they will find a much better area, like Indonesia. Consoles may be seen as luxury items here, but Switch is more affordable compared to touch-screen phones and you can play video games fine here. If Sony PlayStation has official support here, I would like to think Nintendo can go even better, especially after the Mario movie. Note: Sadly, quite a lot of morons in this country think expensive phones are luxury items they will happily show off, yet they only use it for social network sites.
Red China is currently in a recession so people have less money for video games anyways The constantly changing legal situation as well as the problem with foreign IP not being respected plus no console culture make the PRC a terrible market for Nintendo. How is the situation in RoK and RoC(in exile on Taiwan) or other Asian countries?
6:30-8:00 huh? you say things became worse in 2021, then went on to say devs focused more overseas, then you gave a statistic on how the chinese gaming market (chinese stat sources) is expected to grow a lot due to interest in e-sports rather than interest in something else. How is this related? Thank you for buying two of my oranges, I will see you soon.
Nintendo keep flopping worldwide especially in most asian countries such as china india and middle east countries. ps keep destroying Nintendo not to mention pc handhelds like steam deck and mobile gaming
??? Switch remains highly competitive with PlayStation even on recent sales numbers and is Nintendo's 2nd best selling console. It may not be doing well in certain Asian and Middle Eastern countries, but it has been doing extremely well globally. Mobile Gaming doesn't really compete with console and PC. It is filling up its own niche where most of the people within it never were interested in consoles to begin with. Mobile Gaming doesn't take away players from console. PC handhelds is another story though where Nintendo's next console has to compete not only on software which they already are doing well at, but pricing.
@@NBro-nw8rm Ahh yes, game industry analysts. You see, I don't listen to them because they tend to be wrong the vast majority of the time and have been so throughout the entire existence of the games industry. Let's wait and see what actually happens.
@@NBro-nw8rm No, why would I watch that every day instead of playing games that I enjoy? I watch these videos as they pop up in my feed on commutes because they are more entertaining than mobile games. A lot of these "analysts" work for media conglomerates who think about profit first. UA-camrs are often of the same mindset where growth is prioritised. Negativity produces more interactions than positivity. Negativity = More clicks = More money = shareholders are happy because numbers increase or in the case of UA-camrs, more views and subscribers. This is why I don't take games journalism seriously, especially when it comes to predictions and speculation. Most of it is click bait. This is why I always have a wait and see approach, I have been manipulated and burned way too many times at this point. Of course, there are some exceptions where games journalists and UA-camrs produce genuinely good reviews, essays and documentaries about existing games. Videos with some actual substance to them. Those few who go above and beyond are the only reason I bother with videos about games.
Analysts have actually estimated that Nintendo Switch is the market leader in China (I believe making up 45% of total console sales), so they seem to have done a good job considering the circumstances.
China tends to be PC gamers due to their ban on consoles for many years. But there are western countries that are also more favourable to PC also.
I know Nintendo is a company and they are going to try and get that big market but when I look at what happened to Hollywood I am not sure if the rest of the already established consumer market will benefit from an increased Chinese consumer presence…
its china government not the people sadly
I would like to see a video about Nintendo’s potential relationships with third party developers in the next console generation. A common talking point is that no one seriously buys third party games on Nintendo hardware. Clearly this isn’t true as the amount of third party support the Switch regularly gets implies that these developers are seeing incentive to make their games playable on Switch. And Nintendo benefits from third party games selling as they get a cut of that sales revenue.
SteamWorld Dig was apparently a surprise hit.
I am reminded of a Guardian article I read about how Paradox Interactive (makers of strategy titles like Europa Universalis) went public partially to be able to get into the Chinese market via legal channels, yet it did not succeed, whereas Hazelight who made It Takes Two accepted that their sales would be entirely on the grey market and let Chinese streamers market their game where it turned into a hit.
2:45 lol theres nothing wrong with playing to win. pay to win though…
@user-in8qh3zf9d woosh
“Sniffed at”
I love your videos. It would be interesting to see more developer deep dives into companies heavily partnered and associated with Nintendo similar to what you did with Intelligent Systems. Some companies I would like to see are Game Freak, Creatures Inc., Hal Labs, Camelot, and Pokémon Company.
It would be interesting if you did a video breaking down major Nintendo IP which IP rights are split with other companies and which ones are fully owned by Nintendo.
Thank you! I've done a couple of Camelot videos and I did a video last year ("Why Nintendo still ignores some franchises") which touched on IP rights splits. I will get round to Hal and Pokémon but there's such a lot to look through, it may be a while.
Restrictions on gaming is primarily concerned with online gaming. Parents are encouraged to limit the amount of game time students have during the school year.
The limitations of selection is most likely a tencent issue not Nintendo.
There’s also other barriers for the growth of consul gaming in China because third places are readily accessible and free. Culture around free time is just different.
But seriously, they really need to get in South America especially Brazil. 🇧🇷
How do you come out with such wonderful videos with so much research and depth in such rapid succession?!
Great job, friend! Amazing content! Loving your videos!
Thank you so much!
Hi, I wanted to add a bit about games' availability in China. You said that games like BOTW and Animal Crossing are not yet approved by the government. However, these games are being sold and are amongst the popular ones. I suppose tencent's real mission was to promote Nintendo. Most people buy games online, cartridges might be even more popular due to how easy it is to buy. And as far as I know, they were even pre-selling titles like new Pokémon games and Zelda TOTK. Great video nevertheless, very insightful!
Interesting - this info was from early on and I looked for confirmation on whether BotW had since released but couldn't find anything recent. Thanks for sharing!
China has a huge problem with piracy. I don't know if Nintendo had a solution for that.
3:49 the reason ACNH was not sold in China was because it actually got banned.
The reason was that the game was being used to promote political stances relating to Hong Kong, which China consideres it's own territory but many people don't see it that way. So the game probably got banned so that people couldn't promote the "Free Hong Kong" movement and that.
I'm not sure about why BOTW was not being sold, however. Probably because it didn't comply with Chinese video game rules and that.
I’ve seen a video of someone playing Animal Crossing on their Tencent Switch and it worked. Network features were completely broken though, the guy said he had to link a WeChat account to access it.
i think i forgot to mention that the game was banned a month or two after release, not before it released
so i take it the "gray market" sales won't count as chinese sales but inflate the sales of other regions? the switch also didn't officially launch in my country, but most of my friends have one
Mainland Chinese people probably have to get the Taiwan version of Nintendo games that are not released in mainland china or even Hong Kong.
While there're games not released in HK, the HK version of Switch can access eshops of other countries.
The chinese ads for the Switch are great.
How do some people think the Steam Deck compete with the Switch? It cannot do what the Switch shows in the ads.
switch is much more popular than steam deck in China. Ringfit adventures, animal crossing，Pokemon，Zelda were phenomenonal when they were released. BY comparison steam deck only attracts hardcore gamers rather than casual gamers. The first game console people i know bought likely to be nintendo switch.
Can anyone here explain more about gaming scene in China? From what i understand from this video, video games are being restricted by the government so does this means that gaming scene is not really great in China right now?
How about pc gamers? Can they use steam/epic or any other pc game store there? 😅
there is steam china (the steam logo with a red tint) as one of the official ways to get desktop games, but does have a much more limited selection (there are 218 games on there) than steam international (55,596 games with Simplified Chinese)
(the reason there are so few games on steam china is because every game on there has to get permission from the cn government itself so yeah)
from what i remember steam (international) in china is a grey area where everyone uses it and banning it would cause more issues than it solves, and steam china isn't up to the task with replacing it yet (to few games).
steam does block access to steamcommunity if your in mainland china (with out using a vpn), but everything else works like normal in china
(for some stats, the amount of users using English is 32.5%, while Simplified Chinese is at 33.4%.
the total amount of bandwidth used by users from mainland china (255.6 PB, 22.6% of global traffic) is equal to the bandwidth used by users from the US (243 PB, 21.4% of global traffic)
the traffic data is from "steam download stats")
Chinese person here, the gaming market is great here, but mostly mobile. One of the highest grossing mobiles in the world is exclusively chinese actually, 王者荣耀 if you’re curious, it’s a moba.
Legally there is a lot of restrictions, that’s why a lot of people choose to do it ‘illegally’, they’ll make steam accounts from other regions, or buy Nintendo switches imported from Hong Kong or Japan. The chinese versions of the switch and steam are notoriously ass so nobody uses them, that’s why the sales numbers are so tiny, but rest assured the market is huge. I’m pretty sure a lot of sales numbers for switches in those two places are mainland chinese lol, and if you see large numbers in weird countries like argentina or something then it’s 80% chinese gamers. Pc and consoles may not be as big as mobile games but rest assured the gaming scene in general is very great here.
Console and pc gaming is more dominated by male audiences though, but the switch in particular has many female players. Animal crossing and Zelda are really big here.
I think the boom of switch sales happened in covid when animal crossing released? That’s when me and probably a lot of people first became aware that it existed.
I know this sounds strange, but I was wondering what Nintendo's relationship with Sega is like, especially given that they don't have stock with Sammy.
"some of the games being acused of being pLay to win" Is playing to win now bad?
What problems could China have with NINTENDO games of all things? 😂
Luigi's Mansions has spooky undead.
@@Elykar so tru
Why Nintendo (almost) never captions its games to Portuguese?
because brazil doesn't matter to them. Which is only natural considering we left nintendo in the dust ever since the ps1-ps2 era because piracy wasn't as easy for the nintendo consoles and you could just buy pirated copies of PS games anywhere for cheap
Because almost everyone in Brazil pirates nintendo games and even if they were affordable, people would still pirate then, since we even pirate indie games of all things and the switch is exploitable for jailbreak/homebrew.
Pirating nintendo games is almost a cultural thing to do in Brazil.
@@allanderimini398and what about Portugal?
@@andreylucassToo small of a market I believe, unfortunately
@@andreylucass despacitospider said it all, Portugal is too small of a market to consider translating for.
Other game companies usually include brazilian portuguese support, but not european portuguese (portugal), exactly for this reason and since Brazil isn't really profitable for nintendo, it's not worth it to translate dialogue heavy games to brazilian portuguese.
Awsome
I feel it might be better for nintendo to release a custom console instead, that loads only a few games... think of it as a NES & SNES mini, but for switch games. This way nintendo can make a quick buck in China, and focus more on the rest of the world.
that what they did back then
Wild how Sony is doing better
No. Real reason consoles not go well except Japan is...Confucianism. Best example is South Korea. South Korea never banned any console and big electronics corporations even import consoles (Sega Genesis and Saturn are imported and marketed by Samsung) but not succeed well.....even now. Cultural differences are crucial factors that consoles are not working well in Asian market.
I'm baffled by even Nintendo's attempt to try selling it big in China. It's a very restrictive country whose administration has zero interest in gaming, and a unfortunate habit of ripping things off.
If anything, Nintendo should've moved south a bit and they will find a much better area, like Indonesia. Consoles may be seen as luxury items here, but Switch is more affordable compared to touch-screen phones and you can play video games fine here. If Sony PlayStation has official support here, I would like to think Nintendo can go even better, especially after the Mario movie.
Note: Sadly, quite a lot of morons in this country think expensive phones are luxury items they will happily show off, yet they only use it for social network sites.
Red China is currently in a recession so people have less money for video games anyways
The constantly changing legal situation as well as the problem with foreign IP not being respected plus no console culture make the PRC a terrible market for Nintendo. How is the situation in RoK and RoC(in exile on Taiwan) or other Asian countries?
6:30-8:00 huh? you say things became worse in 2021, then went on to say devs focused more overseas, then you gave a statistic on how the chinese gaming market (chinese stat sources) is expected to grow a lot due to interest in e-sports rather than interest in something else. How is this related?
Thank you for buying two of my oranges, I will see you soon.
Is “gray market” a euphemism or a technical term here?
The term's been around a good while.
The thumbnail and title of the video are very contradictory.
chAnI
Nintendo keep flopping worldwide especially in most asian countries such as china india and middle east countries. ps keep destroying Nintendo not to mention pc handhelds like steam deck and mobile gaming
???
Switch remains highly competitive with PlayStation even on recent sales numbers and is Nintendo's 2nd best selling console.
It may not be doing well in certain Asian and Middle Eastern countries, but it has been doing extremely well globally.
Mobile Gaming doesn't really compete with console and PC. It is filling up its own niche where most of the people within it never were interested in consoles to begin with. Mobile Gaming doesn't take away players from console. PC handhelds is another story though where Nintendo's next console has to compete not only on software which they already are doing well at, but pricing.
@_NekOz many game industry analysts said Nintendo next console might flop harder than WiiU era. Bleak and scary time for all Nintendo fans indeed.
@@NBro-nw8rm Ahh yes, game industry analysts. You see, I don't listen to them because they tend to be wrong the vast majority of the time and have been so throughout the entire existence of the games industry. Let's wait and see what actually happens.
@_NekOz what? But you follow and watch game youtubers or gaming news everyday no?
@@NBro-nw8rm No, why would I watch that every day instead of playing games that I enjoy? I watch these videos as they pop up in my feed on commutes because they are more entertaining than mobile games.
A lot of these "analysts" work for media conglomerates who think about profit first. UA-camrs are often of the same mindset where growth is prioritised. Negativity produces more interactions than positivity. Negativity = More clicks = More money = shareholders are happy because numbers increase or in the case of UA-camrs, more views and subscribers.
This is why I don't take games journalism seriously, especially when it comes to predictions and speculation. Most of it is click bait. This is why I always have a wait and see approach, I have been manipulated and burned way too many times at this point.
Of course, there are some exceptions where games journalists and UA-camrs produce genuinely good reviews, essays and documentaries about existing games. Videos with some actual substance to them. Those few who go above and beyond are the only reason I bother with videos about games.