A bunch of posts dunking on Nintendo’s insistence on ‘dumbing down’ marketing for their American audience have been blowing up.
People noticed a trend with Nintendo of America adding a category to every trademark, going as far as to record two versions of each line for their American and UK channels.
You might’ve seen one of the comparisons going around. If not, I’ve attached a video to the original LinkedIn post, and here’s an alt string comparison in text form for context:
■ Nintendo of America: Welcome to the Mario Kart World game! Available exclusively on the Nintendo Switch 2 System.
■ Nintendo UK: Welcome to Mario Kart World! Available exclusively on the Nintendo Switch 2.
The shitposty responses were variants of ‘Nintendo thinks Americans are stupid lmao’, the more serious ones covered the potential trademark considerations and regional marketing norms.
While I don’t doubt those were factors, they aren’t the whole picture imo. I think this is an excellent demonstration of a localization that knows its audience.
Nintendo of America has 10m+ subscribers on Youtube while Nintendo UK has 500k+ subscribers. Unlike the UK channel, the NoA channel is the main medium of video communication with the bulk of the company’s English-speaking players.
As such, those comms need to be created with a couple of things in mind:
- The age bracket of Nintendo’s core target audience, which falls on the younger side compared to other console manufacturers (teens vs all ages).
- ESLs—‘English as a Second Language’ speakers, who make up a staggering 75%+ of English speakers worldwide.
This means that the golden rule is to keep it simple, stupid.
The majority of their players - Natives or ESLs - don’t exactly follow the usual player acquisition funnel that is “Announcement > Advertisement > (Optionally) Research > Purchase”, unlike the more mature player demographics of other consoles.
Children don’t care about reviews; they see something they like and ask their parents for it.
As for ESLs, their regions may not be targeted by Nintendo for advertising. So they usually skip that step straight to research.
For both demos, the more memorable the keywords, the more likely they’ll buy.
”What’s this?” Downloadable content for a game. “What type of game?” A racing game. Here’s a guy racing. “Where can I play it?” On the Nintendo Switch 2™ system.
So yes, this ‘dumbing down’ is unironically genius market-aware localization. I’ll die on that hill.
*They also think Americans are stupid, and yeah. Can’t blame ‘em.
By Seif Chaib.
Originally posted on Linkedin.