FormerNintendomarketing leads Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang have discussed the company’s approach to theSwitch 2backlash (and just backlash in general), and confirmed that it almost always purposefully avoids engaging with it.
Even though theNintendo Switch 2hasquickly made its mark on the gaming world and proven to be amassivesuccess, it hasn’t been without its controversies. From the console’s purported “lack of innovation” to itsinfamously high prices for games like Mario Kart World, Nintendo’slatest handheld has been met with a lot of backlash over the past few months.
While Nintendo is certainly no stranger to backlashand has seen more than its fair share of it, the discussions surrounding the Switch 2 have certainly been a lot more fierce than usual. With that in mind, you might be wondering why Nintendo hasn’t really spoken out against any of the backlash, which isa question that’s been answered by two people who know the company very well.
Nintendo’s Approach To Pretty Much All Backlash Is “Do Not Engage”
That Explains A Lot About The Switch 2’s Launch
As pointed out by GoNintendo, Nintendo of America’s former marketing leads, Kit Ellis and Krysta Yangrecently discussed the company’s approach to backlash on the latest episode of the Kit & Krysta podcast. As always, the pairreveal some surprising truths about Nintendo and how it operates, as it’s usually very secretive.
While chatting about the silence surrounding all of the Switch 2’s controversy,Ellis notes that Nintendo clearly made a decision that it wasn’t going to “engage” with these topics, something that’s “in line” with what they’ve always done when it comes to backlash. Yang notes that situations like this would happen when the two worked at Nintendo, but that the approach was almost always to “pretend it didn’t happen”.
Yang goes further in suggesting that Nintendo doesn’t have “any human emotion” and that it’s “like you’re talking to a robot with no heart”. Nintendo seemingly acts like this to wait out the controversy until it blows over instead of dealing with it, something that Yang thinks is “teaching them that they can do this to you”.
They are not human. They are like a faceless corporate robot. And so their response to you screaming on the internet and being mad is like, ‘I don’t care'. - Kyrsta Yang
Yang and Ellis make it clear that they’re “not advocating” for Nintendo to act like this, and simply explaining why it never responds to any of the controversies that come its way. One thing that Nintendo seems to have figured out is that fans will be happy as soon as the next big thing is shared,which seems to be accurate based on how the Switch 2 is currently doing.
