Ex-Nintendo of America marketing head reveals pressure from executives over lower casual game sales compared to Europe.

The former head of social influencer content at Nintendo of America, Kit Ellis, shared that he frequently faced “chiding” during company meetings for not achieving the same sales numbers for casual games, like Tomodachi Life, as Nintendo of Europe did.

A Twitter user highlighted the engagement levels of posts announcing the upcoming Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream Direct from the official Nintendo accounts across different regions. They pointed out that while the Japanese and American posts garnered tens of thousands of likes, the European announcement received only a fraction of that engagement.

Ellis, who spent 13 years at Nintendo of America from 2009 to 2022 and is well-known for creating and hosting Nintendo Minute, a YouTube channel dedicated to showcasing Nintendo games, responded to the tweet with reflections from his experience at the company.

Interestingly, he noted that this type of game often saw better sales in Europe than in North America. “We’d often be chided in meetings and asked why we couldn’t sell more casual games as well as they did,” he remarked.

Ellis’ observations align with the official sales data for the original Tomodachi Life. The first 3DS title in the series sold over 6.7 million copies, according to Nintendo’s figures, while VGChartz reported around 5.8 million sales, with only about a million copies sold in North America compared to Europe’s 2.65 million.

While Europe has a slightly larger population than North America, these figures indicate that Tomodachi Life was significantly more popular in that region a decade ago.

Get ready, because the delightfully quirky life sim Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is set to receive its own dedicated Nintendo Direct this week.