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Soundwave on 05 January 2017
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maxleresistant said:
Soundwave said:

There is strategy there, you just may not like it. 

By effectively making their two hardware lines into one, Nintendo can now sell the games they spend the most time/money developing (the Splatoons, Breath of the Wilds, of the world) to 80-85% of their audience that doesn't want a Nintendo console unless it has a Wiimote like lightning-in-a-bottle phenomenon. 

Even Nintendo's own fans voted with their wallets and have largely said no to any Nintendo console after the Super NES era and opted instead to buy the handheld only. 

So it was a problem for Nintendo when you are spending the majority of your time and money making games for the minority of your audience. That doesn't make sense. Imagine McDonalds saying they're only going to sell Big Macs to 20% of their restaurants and if you want a Big Mac you must drive to those select locations. 

Beyond that Nintendo just couldn't support two distinct platforms any longer, not with the portable side coming up to PS3/360 tier visuals ... something has to give, that's way too much development resources for two different platforms for any company to realistically bear. Sony/MS wouldn't be able to do it either. 

So in the end I don't even think there was much of a choice for Nintendo in the matter, the Switch approach was really the only realistic way to continue. 

Well of course the fusion of handheld and console development was a logical way to go, but that's not where is the problem.

Like I said in my previous comment, you can create an ecosystem of devices, that tends to different demographic and consumers needs and still put the same games on each devices. That is what apple, and google are doing, and it works very well. And that is also the strategy Microsoft is going with with Windows 10 (PC, One S, Scorpio).

Here like you said, there is only the Switch, a console that tries to please everybody, but you can't please everybody with one device, you just end up pleasing nobody.

So yeah Nintendo will sell the same games to the handheld and the home system crowd under one roof, but that doesn't mean they'll sell more. Take for example Smash Bros, sold on 2 systems, 13 million games sold, with at the time 50 millions 3DS and 10 millions WiiU in the wild. If the Switch, like you say, sells less than the 3DS, then where will they sell more games? To whom?

A strategy like the Switch can only mean a decrease in market share and game sales for Nintendo. Now yes, the reducing in costs of having 2 separate systems will be beneficial, but I doubt Nintendo's plan is to have a smaller place in the market.

The problem with that is a portable has to be a central component and as such, it's not so easy to scale games as people think. 

Windows plays well with other Windows platforms, but most laptops will die in like an hour or two if you try playing a hardcore 3D game on them (provided they can even run them in the first place). 

Having the same game play on a 5 watt device and a 50 watt device and actually utilizing both platforms well is a tough task. 

The iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch have a shared ecosystem sure, and they're different devices, but it's also true that it's not like you can play Uncharted 4 on the iPad while the iPhone is running that game at half res. No, those devices are all fairly close in power. 

And I think Nintendo probably will have different versions of Switch like that, but if you're saying "well why can't I have a Switch console that's 2.5 TFLOP, and the people who want the portable can just have the portable".

No. 

It doesn't work like that, games can only scale so far, as matter of fact I think this is why the docked version of the Switch is even underclocked. There isn't really any big reason why the docked Switch shouldn't run at full clock (1 GHz = 500 GFLOPS), but I think they had to down clock it to 768 MHz (384 GFLOPS approx) because the gap would be too hard to have the same game for the docked and undocked mode if the gap in performance was any larger than the 2.5:1 ratio Nintendo apparently settled on.