by Doc – Owner, Founder, Is Surprised They Didn’t Rename It To “Old Horizons”
So… does Nintendo like Animal Crossing again? A trailer was just dropped at the primetime hour of 8:00 a.m. on a Thursday morning showing the Nintendo Switch 2 edition of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which basically amounts to “here’s another iteration of decorating houses in case you didn’t get your fill of the Happy Home Designer port from a few years back, some more amiibo functionality, a few nice tweaks and NPC additions, and of course an ad for the Nintendo Switch 2 camera… not that you’ll buy it anyway.”
And that’s nice, it really is. I’ll admit that I’m really quite pleased with the addition of video game consoles that can play games through Animal Crossing: New Horizons, as that was a feature that was absolutely awesome back in the days of Population: Growing on the GameCube. And as always, more excuses for people to buy amiibo is fine by me – the day the Series 5 Animal Crossing cards released is a fond memory for me, as that is the day this website pulled in 300,000 views in a 24-hour period. But amiibo aside…
What the Heck is Going on with Animal Crossing?
This is a game that came out 5 years ago, and it supposedly received its last major update in November of 2021. It’s hard to imagine that Nintendo is putting out any free content for this game given management’s hyper-focus on “respecting the value of the game,” which really translates to “no more freebies, and charge them out the wazoo” regarding their business strategy. My best guess is that Nintendo’s thinking they sold enough copies of Animal Crossing: New Horizons and are selling enough Nintendo Switch 2 units that if a certain percentage of the people who own both paid the extra money for the Nintendo Switch 2 edition, they would recoup some profit. That math probably adds up just fine.
Nintendo is no stranger to trying to increase marginal sales off of existing platforms for revenue instead of generating new platforms for revenue, either. Going all the way back to the days of the NES, internal communications showed that management didn’t want to produce a new console – they wanted to keep selling the NES for as long as people were going to buy it. That philosophy certainly seems in line with Nintendo’s other strategies regarding the Switch 2. They built the Switch 2 around the existing consumer base for the Switch, they’ve ported over several games with paid upgrades to the Switch 2 to get a bit more money out of existing customers, and my goodness… Mario Kart 8 was the most recent Mario Kart game for a whole decade! When Mario Kart 8 first came out I was in middle school or early high school, and now I’m an attorney! So they’re just using an existing platform and consumer base to get a bit more moolah.
The Verdict
I think, to answer my previous question, Nintendo is not suddenly a major supporter of Animal Crossing in any transformative way. I think what’s happening is that they are weighing the costs of developing a new Animal Crossing game for the Switch 2 versus keeping the existing one alive and, just like Mario Kart 8 and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, they’d rather spend the significantly smaller amount of resources to keep the existing one alive than to develop a new one.
Let’s just hope we get more amiibo out of this.
Amiibo Doctor 