 Hey everyone, welcome back to Nintendo Prime, we got a lot of stuff to talk about today, a bevy of news stories, all the timestamps are down in the description. Before we get into it I will remind you that all new subscribers in the month of January through January 27th get a chance to win $100 cash that is for new subscribers only. We also are giving away three copies of Pokemon Legends Arceus for everybody to enter to win that head down into the pinned comment and the description. Also if we get a thousand likes in the first 24 hours on this video I'll give away a $50 eShop gift card to somebody down in the comments, that's right kicking off with a bunch of giveaways. Let's get into some of the interesting stuff today because Nintendo is trucking, the news is picking up, we're getting ready to talk about some tangible things today and I can't wait and the first comes from Famitsu. Now we've actually been waiting a couple weeks for Famitsu to drop some new sales data, they usually do these weekly things but it is the holiday period and they're kind of sort of just holding back on it but they didn't hold back on giving us some final sales details for the totality of 2021 and if you want to go back and do the math you can probably figure out what the sales was for the final week and a half or so but Famitsu noted that the Nintendo Switch sold 5.3 million units in Japan last year, that's actually up 200,000 units from when it sold 5.1 million in 2020 so switch momentum at least in Japan has not slowed down at all. Beyond all of that, Switch actually in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 has consecutively sold more and more units in Japan every year. That means Switch has yet to technically crescendo and come back down to Earth, it's just getting more and more and more popular in Japan and yeah, everything else is sort of falling by the wayside. The PlayStation 5 failed to sell 100,000 units last year, it sold like 95, obviously the Xbox sold significantly less than that, in fact, the combined sales of every other video game platform but Switch, the Switch still outsold everything else by over 5 times the amount. So yeah, the Switch is obviously the dominant platform in Japan and it's just really exciting for me to personally think about the fact that this is a real reality we live in today, the Nintendo Switch owns Japan and that's it, nothing else there really matters right now and I just can't believe it. Now speaking of Japan, there's a certain studio from Square Enix that has been really, really responsible for bringing three major games to Nintendo Switch from 2017 through today, those games being Octopath Traveler as a timed console exclusive at the time, obviously it's on other platforms at this point, we also got Bravely Default 2 which as of right now is still a console exclusive on Switch and we have Project Triangle Strategy coming up this March. Well it's three big games, well they announced on Twitter today on their Japanese account that yes they have multiple games to announce and or launch this year including Project Triangle Strategy. Now it's important we pay attention to this particular studio and what they have coming next because obviously all their major titles have been on Switch and have been on Switch first. Now we do know there is supposed to be an Octopath Traveler sequel in the works because this gets confusing for some, Project Triangle Strategy is not actually a sequel, it's a new IP. Now they did do a prequel on mobile devices for Octopath Traveler but they did announce they were working on a sequel quite some time ago but they haven't actually announced the sequel officially just that it's in the works so I think that's probably going to be one of the announcements this year is that Octopath Travelers 2 or you know Quintuplet Travelers or whatever they end up calling it is going to end up being announced at some point this year and I look forward to that because Octopath Traveler was fantastic as for will we get a new Bravely Default game announced at this point when Bravely Default 2 came out quite recently that I'm not so sure about but there could also be other new IPs if you think about it Octopath Traveler was a new IP, Project Triangle Strategy is a new IP, there could be new IPs involved here as well. All I know is they have seen massive success on Nintendo Switch and we really need to pay attention as the year goes on to future Nintendo Directs, E3s, Gamecom and other events that exist out there where Square Enix could be dropping new information because oh boy am I really excited to see what this studio has cooking after Project Triangle Strategy comes out. So a company out there is claiming in their marketing material to a fixed drift. Now we all know Joy-Con Drift has been a massive issue with Nintendo Switch since day one. Nintendo talked about how they've worked on it they've improved it they've made it better but they can never get rid of it and technically drift is something that exists in every single controller. This is one of the you know hundred dollar Switch you know removable faceplate fusion controller like this can drift as well so can the Switch Pro controller so can a PlayStation 5 dual DualSense so can the Xbox Series controller they all can drift. Controller Drift has been an issue going back a long time and it comes to the design of the joysticks and the fact that basically parts wear down and things eventually drift. Well they have claimed a new company is claimed that they have fixed this in their new device and it will be interesting to see if the rest of the industry adapts this technology. So the Aya Neo Next is a new handheld PC competing with Steam Deck coming out later this year. They've actually had the Aya Neo come up before as a $1300 system. Obviously to be price competitive with Steam Deck we'll have to see if this maintains that expensive pricing or if it goes beyond in what technology it uses. There's a lot of information by the way we'll link to the Aya Neo marketing material down below if you want to actually check that out. What we're focusing on in the marketing materials what they're calling the hall effect sticks that fix drift. They basically say drift no more they don't have drift in their controllers and the hall effect is essentially an electro magnet we're not going to get too much into the finer details of it you can look up the hall effect it was discovered a long time ago with electro magnets and stuff and the idea is obviously that no parts of the control stick are actually touching something else so there's nothing that can be worn out it's all ran through magnets electro magnets at that so the big thing the difference between like standard magnets and electric magnets is standard magnets actually lose their magnetism over time whereas electric magnets can maintain the electricity and maintain the magnetism through electricity for a much longer period of time in theory infinitely until the battery dies that's just a theory of course we all know electric magnets you know things that you like to lift up cars and junkyards and dump them into car crushers and all that like yeah those do break down eventually need to be replaced so in theory this fixes drift but fixes drift for how long is it going to be 10 years 20 30 40 until it finally doesn't work anymore or the may the electronics break down or something right I have no idea but it is obviously a massive improvement these theoretically over the way sticks are made now now there are a couple things that we have to obviously ask and wonder right now we know on control sticks we this click you know we click these indices these are button presses they're very frequently used in video games you know to sprint and other things sometimes melee attacks and without having you know parts that actually touch it being a floating magnet like control stick do they have button presses in there is that even a thing can you still press this down and if you do that would it break it's going to be very curious to see how they actually implement that because I don't don't think you can have those control sticks be in there and lose functionality just to get rid of drift so we'll have to wait and see but the IA Neo next is obviously a product coming out this year again we're not going to talk too much about that specific product unless we get it in our hands and then we can compare it to steam deck or compare it to switch OLED and stuff but yeah I do think this is really interesting obviously the question is if this technology is as good as at least it sounds on paper will other people like Nintendo Sony and Microsoft and Logitech and Power A and all the controller manufacturers out there implement it in future controllers and does it drain battery life too much is it is it just too expensive like each one of those joysticks like going to be like a hundred dollars each which you can justify in a fifteen hundred dollar you know mobile PC but can you justify that and you know what is this is a hundred dollar controller let alone a sixty seventy dollar controller or less so we'll have to wait and see it's one of those new technologies that is trying to solve a problem that's been there this whole time will it work will it actually solve it I guess we'll have to wait and find out next up we get to talk about Animal Crossing New Horizons and where it stands historically in Japan the reason we can talk about this is because Stealth my good buddy Stealth on Twitter brought up an interesting point claiming that it was in the top three best selling Nintendo Switch games or really games of all time in Japan I guess top ten sales of all time in the top three specifically so we did some digging into this and it turns out at least as of two thousand eight the top three selling games you know basically was six point eight million seven million and you know ten million and the top two are Pokemon games Gold Silver and the top one being red blue so here's the thing that sounds cool but that's only data up through 2008 well we did some digging into Femitsu numbers of all of the generations of games and nothing has come close to seven million cents until Animal Crossing New Horizons crossed it earlier this month today we are happy to announce that Animal Crossing New Horizons is not only in the top three best selling games of all time in Japan because it is at seven million physically which is ahead of third place Femitsu doesn't include digital sales if digital sales are counted in it's highly likely it has crossed eight million units and become the second best selling game of all time and it depends on how high digital sales go from there if there's an extra couple million three four million digital sales it actually would be the best selling game of all time in Japan so it's somewhere in that top three definitely for sure at number three physically probably at number two that's really crazy to think about that nothing has really done this we talk about how awesome Splatoon sells and Ring Fit Adventures keeps selling in Japan and Mario sells and Smash sells but nothing sells quite like Animal Crossing New Horizons who has done something that hasn't really been done since the 90s in Japan that is just awesome also again shows Nintendo's dominance we talked about it earlier with Switch sales not Animal Crossing New Horizons being one of the best selling games of all time in Japanese history yeah but to save this Nintendo Switch at least in Japan is doing historic things this generation would be an understatement so this last story we're going to get into the facts of this and then why this concerns me because it looks like Nintendo Switch is becoming more and more reliant on digital games now there's nothing wrong with digital games and indie games and everything that releases on the eShop however last year the Nintendo Switch averaged 4.6 digital releases per day that is a lot but okay everything's digital right you know you release yeah what Pokemon Brilliant Diamond Shiny Pro there's physical versions also digital but here's where things get scary according to Matt Piscotella who did some number crunching 357 games in 2020 released on Switch that were exclusively digital games so they did not have physical releases in 2021 that number jumped up to 980 yeah that's a lot of digital only games beyond all of that the Nintendo Switch had almost 1700 total unique games released in 2021 and if you do the math on that more than half of those games were only available on the eShop now we could dive into old rumors and reports about how there's going to be some digital only switch in the future or something I don't know about all of that but what I will say is this does show clearly a trend a growing trend of more digital only games versus physically released games if you are a physical game collector even on Nintendo platforms this should be of concern to you to see that massive of a leap who knows what's going to happen this year it's going to get to the point where there is significantly more digital games than there are physical games and if digital game sales continue to increase that's just going to decentifies releasing games physically in the first place now I don't think Nintendo exclusive games are going to be going all you know digital anytime soon but also Nintendo's own internal data that they've been sharing every single fiscal year has shown that Nintendo's digital sales have been increasing while their physical sales have been decreasing so it's already showing there's a growing gap of gamers that prefer to buy even games available physically digitally now there is a big convenience factor of course to digital games having them readily available at all times not even the swap cartridges not even to lose those tiny cartridges or carry a bunch of them around you know if people want to bring their entire switch library with them everywhere they go and you want to buy all physical I mean you could have you know hundreds if not thousands of these little cartridges you got to bring with and then sort through them to try to get to the game you want now you can obviously be highly organized have special pouches but the point is that obviously it's a lot more convenient to have it available digitally now I do say this on platforms like PlayStation and Xbox I do think deciding to go all digital even though yes we have an all digital PlayStation 5 and obviously the Xbox Series S I do think it can make more sense because you have to install the games anyways right you have to put the disk in and then it installs it ends up downloading half the game off of some server somewhere anyways right so the disk really just serves as a key to let you play the game rather than playing the game off the disk so it yeah you could just own a digital key instead yeah you can't resell digital keys but still I can see where you would go all digital there switch actually a lot of times you could just pop the cartridge into the switch and just play you don't have to update it you don't have to download anything it might prompt you and say there are updates available there is stuff you could download but you don't normally have to you could still have that ease just like back in the Nintendo Entertainment System days of just sticking that cartridge in and playing the game right away of course but then sometimes you had to blow on it and wiggle it and you guys know all of that if you're a classic gamer but still yeah I do find this to be rather fascinating that this is a trend that's happening it does concern me that we might be getting closer and closer to Nintendo not only having their own digital only switch which I'm not necessarily opposed to a digital only switch but Nintendo possibly considering maybe a major release on their next gen platform not having a physical version I don't want that reality to exist I hope Nintendo sticks by the physical medium for generations to come but only time will tell obviously the industry is going to go where it trends most and we've already hit a point where a lot of major things like movies and stuff like I don't even come out on DVDs or Blu-rays some of them are exclusive to streaming services so you know we'll just have to play it by ear and and see what happens and let me know like when you play video games on switch do you tend to play or buy them physically or digitally personally it's a kind of a mix of both but I have been trending more and more towards digital example my most recent purchase on switch was polka bomb brilliant diamond that I bought to stream with you guys on Tuesdays and absolutely I bought it digitally weird right anyways I am Nathan Rubblejans from Nintendo Prime thank you so much for tuning in and I'll catch you guys in the next video