LurkerJ said:
I don't disagree with the price being too high, it may end up hindering the Switch. Unlike the online paywall, the price barrier can be resolved though. Soundwave is suggesting the same, he is implying Nintendo will cut the price of the Switch in 2018, and possibly introduce a Switch Mini to make that happen, which is something I've been arguing will happen as well. |
Cutting the price of 2018 is going to be too late I feel. It's possible that the Switch makes modest but acceptable sales throughout 2017 and they don't cut the price before Christmas and hold back to 2018 but I can't really see that scenerio being likely. I feel it will bomb badly a few months after launch or at least end up with fairly low sales that will be too low to maintain any sort of momentum at retail.
I'm not even sure a large price cut will save it. If you remember the N64 and Gamecube they had severe price cuts because people simply didn't want those products and still sold poorly. The N64 perhaps makes a good comparison because its cartridge format made its games small, expensive and with a reduced range compared to the original playstation. Both PS4 and Xbox one will be entering a lower price stage soon and both are massively superior to Switch. In the UK N64 cartridges started off as high as £60 back when £60 was really worth something but as it went on it was quite easy to get discounted game as low as £4.99 for the weakest titles. I used to get mine from a company called Special Reserve and you used to subscribe for something like £6 a year and got a free N64 game, one of the choices which I remember getting was Turok Rage Wars.
The gaming landscape has become a lot more diluted with both ios and android tablets and mobiles absorbing some of the revenue and customer base. Even if Nintendo had come up a with a brilliant, fully portable and reasonably priced console I think it would have sold in far less numbers than 3DS but what they have released is pretty awful as a package. I thought it was going to be a reasonably priced, slightly more power system than it is with a virtual reality headset that the tablet slides into and was going to have a wider range of more appealling software. I find its performing even more weakly than I feared, has a truly absymal line up of games and prices are through the roof. I thought the lower gpu power would result in more realistic and acceptable battery runtime but if anything they have used such a low capacity battery that they have destroyed the possibility of a minimum 4 hour runtime. It's just so awful on so many levels.
The amount of tat that is getting recycled to fill the Switch game catalogue is beyond a joke. If I wanted to play old games on a brand new games console I'd get one of those chinese psp clones that has like 1000 nes games for $20.
As a wii u owner I'm I just meant to ignore the fact so many games I already have for the wii u are also now Switch games. It wouldn't be so bad but they make up a huge part of the Switch catalogue.
It should have been called the Nintendo KamiKaze console not Switch. I know Nintendo goes with high risk designs but this seems like commercial suicide.
