Hop on the NX Excite Bike!

[Dark Jaguar]

Nintendo seems to be learning from their mistakes with the Wii U. The original Wii succeeded thanks to talk shows promoting it. We can sit here and pontificate on all sorts of gamer reasons it did well, but when it gets down to the most basic level, Oprah made the Wii a hit among a casual audience. If Oprah (and others) hadn't promoted it with long segments on their shows, the Wii would have done about as well as the Gamecube, maybe worse. Look at the Wii U. They just didn't even bother with the talk show circuit, and almost the entirety of that massive casual audience they gained with the Wii didn't even know the Wii U existed. Heck, they STILL don't! One of my brothers is very casual when it comes to gaming (he occasionally breaks out his old N64 to play a few rounds of Mario Kart/Party, but beyond that he is much more interested in hiking than gaming), and when he saw a Wii U over Thanksgiving, he honestly didn't know, even now, that Nintendo had even released a console after the Wii, much less that it was about to be retired. I expect that's a pretty normal response at this point, because that same casual audience they won over with the Wii DOESN'T EVEN KNOW POLYGON.COM EXISTS! Why would they? It would surprise them as much as it surprised all us bleeding heart liberals to find out that the alt right and their own web sites exist. So, no matter how big the news about the Switch is, the casuals will never even see a single article about the thing because they aren't even going to the same web sites we are.

Nintendo seems to realize this. They're pushing this Switch as a revolution bigger than the Revolution, and they know that the only way anyone outside of their core audience is going to even know the device exists is if they announce it in the venues "normies" frequent, and that means talk shows. Frankly, I'm not a big fan of Fallon either (I prefer Colbert, then Conan), but Nintendo knew they had to do this. I fully expect over the next week or so we'll be seeing Reggie and Shiggy popping up all across the talk show circuit, because they need to (and are probably doing the same on whatever Japan's popular talk shows are). If they're smart, they'll also do the Youtube circuit and pop up as ultra-special guests on the big name gaming Youtube channels, and that means Pewtiepie. Like him or not (to me, he's okay I guess, but not really my favorite style, as I prefer beard bros or the pherlous) he's the absolute biggest star when it comes to that sort of thing, dwarfing even the likes of the AVGN. Oh, and Nintendo has a facebook and twitter account, for what that's worth (less and less these days), but that's not going to reach a casual audience, because they aren't checking those particular hash pounds.