Nintendo is having a busy day on Twitter, with plenty of fans interacting with its posts and sharing the good word about the gaming company's plans for the future. But in what seems like any other day for the purveyors of all things Mario, many are asking what is leading to all the attention. The answer, it appears, may be twofold.
The biggest recent Nintendo announcement came earlier on, with the surprise reveal of the upcoming Game Builder Garage, a digital workshop for aspiring game developers and hobbyists alike to create their own video games for the Switch. The software looks to be building on the foundations laid by previous games like Super Mario Maker and WarioWare DIY, allowing a relatively cheap and versatile workspace for anyone to create some pretty cool content if they desire, and the announcement saw a lot of love from well-known figures in the industry like Cliff Bleszinski and Rami Ismail.
Not everyone is so excited by Nintendo's big news, though. Several fans, particularly those anxiously awaiting any whiff of intel about highly-anticipated titles like Breath of the Wild 2, saw it as mere corroboration that the company had no bigger games to look forward to this year, while others considered the game something of a rip-off of the PS4's Dreams or other software like GameMaker Studio.
At the time of writing, Nintendo of America's initial Tweet has over 3,000 replies and 11,000 quote tweets commenting on Game Builder Garage in some fashion, with plenty more scattered across the company's other worldwide accounts, so it's undeniably been at least part of the reason for Nintendo's virality today.
On the other hand, talk of Nintendo's recent sales milestones might have contributed too. As reported by Daniel Ahmad on Twitter, the Nintendo Switch was recently reported in Nintendo's own year-end financial documents to have passed a jaw-dropping 84.59 million units sold worldwide, 49 months after its launch. The impressive milestone has plenty of further layers to unearth, too: the Switch is reported to be selling faster than the Wii and the PS4, and has sold more units now than the GameBoy Advance and the PSP, with the PS3 and Xbox 360 soon to be eclipsed as well.
There's plenty of buzz about these impressive statistics on social media, and lots of people are also talking about other interesting tidbits from Nintendo's documents too, like their list of best-selling software and a glimpse at upcoming plans. Mario Kart 8 is sitting pretty at the top with 35.4 million copies sold, with Animal Crossing: New Horizons nipping at its heels with 32.6 million. That said, most of the interest in talking about Nintendo's financials seems to understandably come from games media, as opposed to the huge portion of the general public Tweeting about Game Builder Garage, for better or for worse.
Still, there's clearly plenty going on at Nintendo HQ, and whether a given Twitter user is coming up with a pithy meme about their upcoming game creation software or marveling at the impressive sales, the important thing is that they're talking about Nintendo. And as any marketing executive worth their salt knows, any publicity is good publicity.
Source: Nintendo
