Releasing games during the holidays always seems like a chicken-and-egg scenario to me. Maybe a game released in November would do just as well if it were released in June. Maybe the main reason it does so well in the fall and winter is because it happens to release there. Until anyone listens to my rambling hypotheticals, though, it turns out Nintendo actually have hard data that the real money comes in the last few months of the calendar year, something to the tune of 60 percent of their revenue in North America.
In an interview with Yahoo Finance, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime casually drops the number in an effort to emphasize how big holidays are for the company.
“The holiday selling season — October, November and December — critically important to our company,” Reggie told Yahoo Finance. “The Americas are the company’s most successful region by revenue, and the holiday season is the region’s biggest driver. We typically do, in the Americas, about 60% of our revenue during that time frame. The reason that it’s so significant is first, our products make great gifts.”
That means that the months Fils-Aime outlined — October through December — make more than January through September. This isn’t incredibly shocking as Christmas is big business, but it it kind of does explain Nintendo’s seeming dislike of summer releases once upon a time. The closer you inch to Christmas, the better chance your game and systems have. That said, the Switch released in March, so maybe placement is not the entire equation.
[Source: Yahoo Finance]
