Argentine Nintendo eShop Shenanigans Helped Drive Let’s Build Zoo Sales
Featured on Nintendo’s eShop can be a tall order, especially for games that aren’t first-party titles or Switch exclusives, but Let’s Build a Zoo has risen to the top thanks to its viewership. spend no money.
As detailed in a Twitter thread by Mike Rose, who works for the publisher of No More Robots, it seems he’s noticed that the zoo management game is doing amazingly in Argentina. As Rose discovered, this is a case of people booking their Nintendo regions to Argentina and taking advantage of that territory to sell games for as little as $1.50. This may be demoralizing news as people take advantage of regional pricing, but the story has a silver lining.
Let me tell you the story of how a small country called “Argentina” helped us launch the biggest Nintendo Switch to date.
I write “Argentina” in quotes because… it’s not really Argentina, is it?
Time for another classic Nintendo eShop theme: pic.twitter.com/vsVrJ12R94– Mike Rose (@RaveofRavendale) October 13, 2022
Since Let’s Build a Zoo sold well in Argentina, it made it into the top 100 of the eShop rankings for the entire Americas region. With the game rising through the ranks – Nintendo counted units sold rather than total revenue earned for its leaderboard position – many US eyeballs appeared on the product and not long before the effect was repeated in eShops in Europe and Australia.
“A week after launch, we’re near the top of the Deals tab on nearly every eShop,” Rose tweeted. “Specifically the Game + DLC pack that people buy in bulk, so the average price people pay is over $20!”
While that’s good news for Let’s Build a Zoo Springloaded developer and its publisher, Rose explained that platforms need to consider how easy it is to swap regions for people looking to buy the game. play as cheaply as possible, a practice that can be very harmful to smaller studios.
The Argentina method is not only used on Switch games, like Note Rosebut has also been used on the Steam and Xbox platforms.
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