Soundwave said:
The DS era was a different time, people were easier to impress, the full weight of what Apple was about to do and the smartphone industry had not really shaped people's expectations. So something like the OG DS to DS Lite was considered an impressive change for 2006, but that's 12 years ago. The 3DS revisions ... every single one of them basically resulted in no sales boost, and in many cases it actually resulted in a decline. Past that, I don't even think the 5-6 year cycle works for Nintendo, it was a set up born out of the 1980s when Nintendo had 100% third party support and could easily have 5 years of content. In the post Playstation era where Nintendo doesn't get that anymore and has to rely on basically 7 or 8 main franchises to sell a platform ... it's hard to not be tapped out of content even by year 3. The Switch for example will have used up basically all the A/B-tier Nintendo franchises by the end of 2019 (3D Mario, 2D Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, PLG, Mario Kart, Splatoon, Animal Crossing, Fire Emblem). It's not a coincidence most Nintendo hardware sales really start to decline by year 4/5 of their hardware cycles, because that hardware cycle was never designed to be a setup where the system was mainly sold by Nintendo games. The NES and SNES were not like that. |
Switch is not the 3DS, it's selling as well at $300 as 3DS did at a $170. There's a lot of interest in various hardware revisions of the original Switch.
As for "they won't have any more system sellers after year 3", even if that were true, a Switch 1.5 in 2020 and every 2 years thereafter doesn't solve that anyway.
Last edited by curl-6 - on 27 November 2018
