Why are third party games selling well on Switch?

[Sordel]

YouTube has a lot to do with it.

Due to the pressure of having to produce content on a daily basis, the more prominent gaming YouTubers tended to move away from games that ate all their time (among them many of the traditional AAA bestsellers) and to look for games that were quick to assimilate, either because they were short or because their length came from procedural generation and repetition. This led to the rise of the Indie on PC ... but while may of those same games were available on the main two consoles, console gamers tended to be happier with the games that fitted the old AAA paradigm: great graphics, for example.

When Switch arrived there was a big demographic that had heard about Stardew Valley, Undertale, The Binding of Isaac etc. but which hadn't really got into them because they didn't want to sit at their PC for hours retrogaming and didn't have space for those games in their couch gaming lives. Suddenly the same YouTubers who pushed Indie games were raving about the Switch as the perfect place to play what is rapidly becoming a huge number of proven critical darlings. This was the opportunity to build new libraries of Indie games on a platform flexible enough to provide new opportunities for gaming sessions.

When we talk about Nintendo's third party problems from the past, we aren't really talking about independents. Third parties were always making money on Wii, but no one cared about their successes because no serious gamer wanted to play shovelware or a clearly sub-par port of a AAA game. Switch has what are objectively the worst versions of several AAA games from this generation and they haven't (as far as I know) set the world alight in terms of sales. The old Nintendo problems are still there, but masked by the success of both the Indies and the first-party games.

So why didn't this happen for the PS Vita, which is in many ways just as good as the Switch and had a head start? I've got to think that it has to do with the fact that the Vita exclusives never drove system sales and were abandoned too quickly. Sony must be doing some pretty intense soul searching because they could have headed off Nintendo's resurgence. Of course the Vita also has a smaller screen and less comfortable controls: the form factor of the Switch is also right.

Yet another element in the success of the Switch is market sentiment. People were desperate for it to succeed: people even wanted Nintendo to kill the 3DS because they were terrified that Nintendo fans would stay on the old handheld generation and that Switch would never develop sales momentum. When the successes started coming, everyone was trumpeting them, everywhere. As confidence grew you had more Switch owners and more of them were willing to invest in developing a library on the system. Suddenly all the graphs were trending upwards.