| By Gale Staff |
With all of the recent ups and downs in the market, today’s business students need reliable sources that go beyond the headlines for a deeper appreciation of how internal, company-level priorities interact with external market forces.
Gale Business: Insights is your bridge between the complexities of an ever-changing business landscape and a hands-on learning experience in the classroom. Designed for undergraduate and graduate students, Gale Business: Insights features more than 430,000 company profiles, country overviews, detailed financials, and regularly updated market research reports—all housed in a single database, renowned for its convenience and reliability.
To explore Gale Business: Insights and its capabilities, let’s conduct a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis of Nintendo. Today, this well-loved household brand is at a crossroads as it seeks to build on the success of the Switch with a new console in an industry where consumer spending is down, the convenience of mobile devices is king, and tariffs loom large.
To get started, Gale Business: Insights includes pre-populated SWOT analysis charts that provide a high-level overview. We have paired each section with interpretive guidance and discussion prompts to help move the exercise from surface-level observation into deeper strategic thinking.
But first, let’s take a look at SWOT: how it works, and how to make the most of this activity in the classroom.
Progressing SWOT from Framework to Functional Business Tool
SWOT analysis serves as a structured brainstorming exercise that helps decision-makers filter information and set actionable priorities. When applied thoughtfully, SWOT can help distill competing inputs into a practical decision-making agenda that guides an organization’s focus and serves as a reference point as conditions evolve. There are two primary tasks involved in SWOT analysis:
- Identifying where growth is most likely to come from next. Opportunities such as favorable timing or underutilized assets may, with the right investments, support revenue expansion or improve the company’s market position.
- Determining which constraints to address with the greatest urgency. A good analysis will isolate the concerns most likely to threaten progress, like margin compression, shrinking operational capacity, and declining product interest.
SWOT Analysis in the Classroom
In a classroom setting where the exercise is strictly hypothetical, SWOT analysis runs the risk of appearing as a one-dimensional, fixed-grid exercise: strengths in one box, threats in another—and everyone on the same team. Inside an organization, however, the analysis may be more complicated and the process more fluid.
Each department brings different priorities to the table that can frame the same issue from multiple angles. Sales might flag declining engagement with a product line as a risk. Operations could argue that the same product is the most stable part of the portfolio. A delay in development might prompt concern from leadership, while quality control defends additional product testing.
While valuable as a starting point, a meaningful SWOT analysis doesn’t stop with four neatly filled boxes. To turn isolated metrics into strategic insights, business students need tools that help them draw connections across multiple SWOT quadrants and propose actionable, forward-looking strategies that reflect the company’s broader goals.
Gale Business: Insights offers a platform for students to explore these tensions through real-world data. The following simulated SWOT analysis draws on those resources to model how students can weigh competing priorities and apply their business acumen in a practical context.
Company Snapshot: Nintendo
Nintendo, one of the most enduring names in interactive entertainment, started as a Kyoto-based Hanafuda playing cards producer in 1889. While Nintendo’s traditional product had a niche market in Japan by the mid-20th century, the company struggled to scale due to gambling restrictions and limited international demand.
In the 1960s and 70s, under the leadership of Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo began experimenting with a wide range of products, including taxi services and instant rice. The company’s shift toward electronic entertainment came with the rise of laser clay shooting games in arcades and bowling alleys. Their success with light gun games like Kousenjuu was an early indicator of their interest in gaming accessories, such as external controllers to enhance player interaction, culminating in the creation of iconic accessories like the NES Zapper.
Nintendo finally gained their footing in digital gaming with the 1983 release of the Family Computer or Famicom. When introduced internationally as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), it redefined the home console market and established Nintendo as a dominant force in interactive media.
Today, Nintendo’s portfolio includes some of the world’s most recognizable franchises, such as Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Animal Crossing, and Pokémon. Still, it doesn’t license its best-known characters or build for third-party platforms. Instead, it creates hardware that supports its creative vision with tightly integrated gameplay and design.
After a sharp decline during the Wii U era, Nintendo saw a significant rebound following the launch of the Switch in 2017. According to 2024 data from Gale Business: Insights, the company reported annual revenue of ¥1.6 trillion ($11.3 billion) and an operating profit exceeding ¥500 billion ($3.5 billion).
Strong global demand for Switch hardware and sustained engagement with first-party titles have driven strong momentum for Nintendo. Hoping to build on the success of the Switch, the Switch 2 is set to launch on June 5, 2025. While console sales remain Nintendo’s primary revenue source, flagship game releases and downloadable content now represent a growing share of the company’s overall profitability.
Nintendo SWOT Analysis
Now, we’ll take Nintendo’s market data to illustrate a practical example of how a business can apply SWOT analysis. In-depth content available through Gale Business: Insights can help us understand how internal priorities, like product development and pricing, interact with external pressures, including shifting consumer demand, regulatory changes, and pressure from competitors. Let’s first take a look at internal factors, strengths and weaknesses, before then turning to external forces, threats and opportunities.
Strengths
Nintendo’s strength is not just in what it produces but in how tightly it controls the environment in which those products exist. In designing hardware around its own creative priorities, the brand achieves a level of cohesion that competitors—who often rely on third-party developers—can’t replicate.
Nintendo games reinforce a distinct user experience that feels consistent across generations. Franchises like Mario, Zelda, and Animal Crossing carry forward that identity, continually reimagined within a familiar framework, offering something new without severing ties to what made them meaningful in the first place.
- How does Nintendo’s vertical integration give it an advantage over competitors that rely on third-party platforms?
- In what ways can nostalgia function as both a creative asset and a business strategy for Nintendo? Does this come with limitations? Untapped opportunities?
- What risks come with relying on franchise familiarity as a growth strategy?
Weaknesses
Nintendo’s strengths are closely tied to its limitations. The same proprietary approach that enables cohesion also narrows its reach. By limiting its titles to its hardware, Nintendo forfeits the broader distribution networks that competitors use to scale. Nintendo also creates a steeper barrier for third-party developers, many of whom prioritize platforms with higher processing power or wider user bases.
Internally, this creates pressure to sustain momentum with a relatively small number of major releases. When a console underperforms (i.e., Wii U), Nintendo has fewer external anchors to stabilize revenue, making each hardware cycle a higher-stakes proposition.
- What assumptions underlie Nintendo’s decision to prioritize control over audience reach, and how might emerging distribution models challenge those assumptions?
- Nintendo’s ecosystem limits scalability—but are there benefits to that limitation in terms of customer and developer commitment?
- Is there a future in which Nintendo could expand beyond its proprietary model without undermining the core of its identity, or is the model itself non-negotiable? What future strategies might the brand consider if it chooses to expand?
Opportunities
As gaming becomes less tied to dedicated hardware and more embedded in daily life through mobile platforms and streaming, Nintendo faces a decision: protect the integrity of its tightly controlled ecosystem or experiment with selective expansion.
Early ventures into mobile development, such as the release of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, suggest a willingness to test new formats, but the company hasn’t yet committed to scaling those efforts. Taking on that challenge could reap significant gains in audience reach, particularly among those who may never buy a console and in regions where mobile gaming dominates.
- If Nintendo were to invest in growth beyond its own hardware, which approach do you think would align best with its brand: expanding mobile development, pursuing cross-platform licensing, or deepening its subscription-based offerings? Why?
- What criteria should guide Nintendo’s decision to enter a new format or region, and what trade-offs might those choices involve?
- As game distribution becomes more fragmented across platforms and regions, what metrics might Nintendo use to define success?
Threats
Nintendo’s self-contained model is increasingly rigid compared to competitors. Players on other platforms can trust that the majority of new titles are available to them, regardless of whether they play on Xbox, PlayStation, PC, or, increasingly, mobile devices.
For Nintendo, enjoying its top titles requires an expensive suite of hardware, including a console and accessories. The Switch 2, for example, has a retail price of $449.99. That’s a steep commitment, especially in a market where inflation-adjusted home entertainment spending in the U.S. has declined by nearly 9% (approximately $10 billion) since 2014. As consumer habits shift toward affordability and cross-platform access, Nintendo’s closed model becomes harder to justify for anyone not already bought in.
- If entertainment spending continues to decline, Nintendo risks becoming a luxury product in an increasingly fragmented and price-sensitive market. In what ways is that both a liability—and a potential strength?
- How would Nintendo need to adapt to stay competitive if the company could no longer rely on releasing new consoles as its business model?
- What kinds of cultural or creative relevance does Nintendo risk losing if its model becomes inaccessible to players outside affluent markets?
The business leaders of tomorrow need the data to analyze real-world challenges that companies face. Gale Business: Insights offers in-depth market coverage to equip students with the necessary context to step into the shoes of decision-makers and engage with the realities they will face across their careers.
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