What Animal Crossing can teach us about marketing and product development

Animal Crossing: New Horizons sold 13 million copies in six weeks, making it one of the most popular games of modern times. The universal, de-stressing nature of the game contrasted with what 2020 unleashed at the same time in the month of March.

One of the first marketing lessons that Nintendo, the developer of the runaway hit game provided was that timing is everything.

The way Nintendo worked on the issues, glitches and other problems it encountered and solved it quickly provides us another lesson: Listening to the end-user and prioritizing the features or the changes based on user feedback.

Nintendo restricted players who have bought the ‘Switch’ console which plays the hit game, to only be able to create one island. This has been a controversial restriction, but has enabled more sales of the console.

The lesson here is to provide something for free but add revenue-creating restrictions to your business model.