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Page Rank in Nintendo’s eShop web

https://www.gameinformer.com/2018/07/09/nintendo-aiming-for-20-30-indie-releases-on-switch-per-week

This article focuses on the gaming company Nintendo reports on its desire to increase the number of indie games that are coming to its latest system, the Nintendo Switch. Although the system’s biggest stars are still its first party games, recent trends have become increasingly focused on indie games, and Nintendo doesn’t want to leave its player base unsatisfied. The head of licensing, Susumu Tanaka, recently stated that the company was aiming to increase the indie releases on the Switch eShop to 20-30 new games per week. This level of output would result in over a thousand new games a year, and while not all of the games will be high profile successes, many people see the influx of games as a benefit. The focus on the digital releases is a tactical move. Nintendo is heavily incentivized to increase the amount of game purchases specifically on its eShop because it doesn’t have to pay any of the manufacturing costs that come with physical cartridge releases, and consumers are happy to pay for the convenience of easily switching between games.

From a Networks lens, we can look at Nintendo and the games on its platform as a web.  For every game on the Nintendo eShop, there is an edge pointing from Nintendo to that game. Every game, however, points to all of the consoles that it is available on. Some popular games are also pointed to by critiques and news coverage. Since the games and Nintendo both point to others and are pointed to, they wouldn’t fit well into the category of authority or hub. Instead, we can look at it from the perspective of page rank. By pointing to a large number of games, Nintendo is splitting its page rank score among many different games but also increasing the number of incoming scores it receives. In order for this addition of games to increase Nintendo’s page rank, it could do a number of things. First, it could add games that are exclusive to the Nintendo switch so that game gives all of it’s page rank back to Nintendo. Alternatively, Nintendo could add popular games that have several news articles pointing to them. This would allow Nintendo to gain page rank because the page rank it receives would be higher than what it delivers. Adding random other games might actually be detrimental to Nintendo, both in terms of networks and in terms of consumer satisfaction if the influx of games oversaturates the market and makes game curation less effective.

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