 Before I get into today's video I want to remind you that we are on our road to 100,000 subscribers and if we can get there by the time Tears of the Kingdom comes out, we will be giving away a collector's edition of Tears of the Freakin' Kingdom. That's right, that's steelbook, right? You get that cool steelbook, the pin set, the poster, the art book, and I know it leaked. Whatever! You can have it first hand. All you gotta do is subscribe to the channel for a chance and let's make magic happen. Alright, so we got a couple of things I want to get into today. First one, we'll deal with something that's a brand new news story, Metroid Prime Remaster doing the seemingly impossible. Of course, maybe you might not think it's as impossible as you think, but it has been firing out the gates, topping sales charts everywhere that it's available. Heck, in the UK it debuted at number two having the fourth largest physical release of all time. Of course, it also sold out physically in the UK, so it's not even counting digital sales. But our good friend of the channel, the man, the myth, the legend, Paul Gale Network, who was heavily connected in this industry, was at the Super Nintendo World launch around Chris Pratt and Doug Bowser and everyone else from Nintendo. Here's the thing, he put out there yesterday that Metroid Prime Remaster has crossed 1 million in sales. Now he noted less than half of these sales are physical and with the limitations on the physical release and all the scalping, not really a surprise that less than half are physical. Also, it launched a full week early digitally, but it has already crossed 1 million in sales, hitting its first major milestone. Obviously next is 2 million and who knows from there. So I do think Metroid Prime Remaster will probably cross 2 million copies eventually. I'm not sure on what the legs for this game is going to be. Typically, Metroid games aren't ever green, so they don't tend to sell a lot over time. So really, I don't know that we're even going to get that much more than a million. I know some people predicted that it would outsell Metroid Dread, it's a 3D Metroid game, it's only 40 bucks, but also Nintendo didn't put a ton of marketing behind Metroid Dread. So yeah, I kind of think it might hit 2 million at the top end, but still these are absolutely incredible sales for a game just randomly dropped out of the sky with no warning. So hey, it's crossed a million, it's a massive milestone, I'm really happy to see Metroid games consistently doing well. And you know what, we just need 2 and 3 and eventually Metroid Prime 4 unveiled. I think Metroid Prime 4 at this point might be a cross generation title or something, but that's either here nor there. We got to get 2 and 3, right? Like hey, there's rumors about those games also coming at some point. Hopefully we get them before the end of the year, that would be really really cool. The last thing I want to talk to you and what we're going to spend a majority of this video on is the precarious situation Nintendo finds them in. They are in uncharted territory because Nintendo has traditionally fumbled the ball when they've been in this situation, right? They were at the top of the world back in the original Game Boy and Nintendo Entertainment System days, and they basically fumbled the ball, especially on the home console side. While the Super Nintendo was a successful system, there were other competitors coming up like the Sega Genesis, and Nintendo didn't really capture the same success they did with the Nintendo Entertainment System. And then the next time they had a massively successful home console, and heck, even handheld, was the Wii and DS days, right? That's really when things blew up again. By the way, not knocking Game Boy Advance, it did incredible as well. But we had the Wii and DS days, and Nintendo kind of fumbled the ball. The next generation of devices for Nintendo became the combined worst selling generation in Nintendo's history. While the 3DS did cross 75 million in sales, it actually was Nintendo's worst selling handheld system. That just goes to show how amazingly well their handhelds have sold. And then home console wise, Wii U was far and away their worst selling. I know some people might bring up Virtual Boy. Virtual Boy was in a home console. It was a tabletop 3D console. It was kind of its own category as it were. So it's very interesting looking at this Nintendo Switch situation. Look, I'm not saying they need to release a new platform this year. We all know about all those reports and rumors and stuff that we've already talked about all last week. But what I'm really curious about is how Nintendo is going to handle this transition. Because again, in Nintendo's history, they fumble the transition. They mess it up. They don't get it right. And I do wonder what Shintara Furukawa is going to do because he's more of a numbers person. He has never actually handled a system launch. People might forget Shintara Furukawa didn't launch the Nintendo Switch. Nintendo Switch was Iwata's final idea for a system and was heavily in production right up until the moment that he died. He was still heavily involved in phone calls. May he rest in peace. Iwata was in his dying days still putting in that work to make Switch happen. But really we had a transitionary president at Nintendo who was pretty old. But obviously they needed to put someone at the helm. And he handled the launch of the Nintendo Switch. Him probably combined with Reggie Fieseme. Reggie Fieseme was on the board at that time and a major player. And obviously as one of the leftovers of the Iwata era probably was really influential in launching Switch and making sure it got off the ground just right. But here's the thing. That was obviously back then and here we are today. We have a new president both at Nintendo of America and Doug Bowser who is not on the board in Japan. And we have obviously a new president of the whole of Nintendo in Shintura Furukawa who came from the accounting side of Nintendo. He's been at some other companies but he's been at Nintendo a long time handling accounting and various other business related jobs like that. So he's at the helm and while Miyamoto is obviously still there as are some of the old guard able to influence things a little bit. Ultimately it's up to Furukawa and you know Doug Bowser in a lesser degree because Doug Bowser is the president of Nintendo's largest sales region to come up with a way to transition successfully to the next platform. And whether that's this year, next year, the year after, whenever it happens Nintendo is in a precarious situation because they've never really quite gotten the transition from a successful platform right. They've always dropped the ball in one way or another. And I wonder what Nintendo is going to do this time now. If you look at the competition which I think Shintura Furukawa might be more aware of than past presidents, I don't know. But obviously Xbox, PlayStation, PC, phones, etc. have handled transitions into new devices quite seamlessly and the biggest thing they've done especially when you look at the PlayStation 5, Xbox series and say even phone devices today is that those devices don't abandon the old audience. The old audience, their devices are still, you know, the ones they own now are still relevant. They still get new software. They still get updates and they're not really left behind. They're given the time to transition at their own pace. And this has led obviously to consistent sales for PlayStation where the 1, 2, 3, you know, 4 and 5 are all doing really, really well. And even PlayStation 3, their worst selling system was at 80 million units which would have been right at the top of Nintendo sales chart until we landed. So obviously even PlayStation's worst home console would have been a success for Nintendo. So I hope that they learn from the way these companies have handled transitions over the years. And Nintendo realizes a couple of things. One, you can't just abandon the Switch platform. I think that is what has a lot of people scared every time we bring up this topic of a new system. I just got to switch OLED or I might buy the Zelda OLED and there's my first switch to play Tears of the Kingdom. You know, they don't want the transition. They're going to leave me behind. You know what? Your fear is relevant because Nintendo has traditionally left people behind at the end of a generation. But hopefully Nintendo has learned that that's not the way to do it. You don't alienate the current audience when you're launching a new device. You keep that current audience up to date. You give them games. You cross platform games. I understand Nintendo's tradition is, hey, we might have some backwards compatibility, but any new games coming on the next platform are going to be exclusive to that platform. You must buy that platform. We are completely abandoning our old audience. And I hope that Nintendo gives a transition period or at least a year. You know, if the system launches this year, okay, then the entirety of 2024, that all their major games that year end up being cross platform, that's the way to treat your audience right. I know some people get frustrated by that. They want games to be exclusive to the next platform, so they get the best of the best possible. But also, Nintendo needs to worry about that transition. PlayStation 5 doesn't have a ton of games exclusively on it that didn't also release on PlayStation 4. But now that we're entering year three, we're in year three actually, and thinking about year four next year for PlayStation, we're going to start seeing more and more games that aren't on PS4, but are exclusively on PlayStation 5. And that's how Sony handles their transition. By year three, you start to get a lot of the big exclusives. Before that, you still get big games with the cross platform, so they don't abandon that old audience. And I think if Nintendo could do that for even a year, if they don't go as long as Sony, just one year of that cross platform support, I think would do wonders. So if Nintendo announces a new platform, drops it this holiday, I think people will be less inclined to be upset because Nintendo could promise a full year of support, which would be absolutely wonderful. That would mean, hey, if Metroid Prime 4 comes out next year, it'll be on both platforms, right? The new Mario game could be on both platforms. So I do think that that is something to consider. I do think if they launch like a new Mario Kart, that might stay exclusive just because we already have Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on the Switch. Stuff like that that comes once a generation. But anyways, I don't know. These are just my thoughts. I hope that Nintendo learns. I know they're in a precarious situation. They're in uncharted territory with how successful and the fervor of sales they're still getting as we just proved with Metroid Prime Remaster, as we saw with Pokemon Scarlet Violet last holiday, as we're going to see with Tears of the Kingdom. Clearly, the audience still wants software. So I hope Nintendo goes, look, we might need to launch the next thing. It's going to be in the same family. We're going to do cross-gen for a while. And we're just going to take advantage of every market, the market that wants something new, the market that wants things to stay the same, and we can end up hitting this perfect sales equilibrium in the way that Sony does, in the way that phone devices do, and Xbox has done this generation. So here's hoping that Nintendo learns and they take advantage of what they've seen. And honestly, if a device comes this year, I already think that means Nintendo has learned. Since they are releasing Tears of the Kingdom, this May, Pikmin 4, this July, typically Nintendo would release nothing major leading up to a device launch so they could have all those exclusives. But if they do launch it this holiday, that does feel like Nintendo's already learned because we're still getting major games on Switch, really, you know, throughout this year. So, I mean, we don't know what's happening after July, but you know what I mean. Like, when new systems launch in a few months after that, it kind of makes sense that there's a small gap. But if that gap is in a whole year in just a few months, that makes a lot of sense. And if the next major game that's launching with it also is on Switch, you're going to reinvigorate some Switch sales anyways. You presume a price cut for the holidays, new system comes out, people buy the expensive one, people that want to get that new game on the cheap buy the cheaper Switches. Honestly, it's a perfect equilibrium and I hope that Nintendo does that. For now, we don't know what Nintendo is going to do. You let me know how you would handle the transition down below from a business perspective. I know there's that personal perspective of what we want, what we want them to do, what sort of device we want. But if you're a Nintendo and you're all about making that money and keeping that audience, what would you do to transition? Would it involve this year? Would it involve many years from now? Let me know down in the comments below. I am Nathaniel Rovell Jance. I want to thank you so much for being here. I have a smidge of an update on my office situation. I actually had a different video today with my laptop crash and all the files got corrupted and it's a pain in the butt. Our Mac Studio that we ordered a few weeks ago, back on February 22nd, looks like it might be shipping this week. It's moved into preparing to ship. That's going to make a world of difference for the content. I'll be back on camera and what we're just going to be flying through content, multiple videos a day, way better editing. I just can't wait, guys. I love making content for you guys. Anything that makes that easier takes us to the next level, enables us to do more is something I'm always excited about. I hope you're excited for that content as well. As we continue to build this channel and hopefully by the end of this year, you're seeing videos that no matter what it's about, you're just happy to watch. I'll catch you guys in that next video.