| barneystinson69 said: Now I'm sure I'm going to have people say "OH, THE SWITCH IS A HYBRID, ITS TECHNICALLY A HOME CONSOLE AND HANDHELD!!!" |
And I will agree with those people; because that is what it is. I could as easily say it's the guts of a console that I can pull out and use on the go. What you view it as primarily is a use case pereference, but by definition it is both.
Switch as a handheld only would do badly. They're milking the 3DS as a budget variant with a thousand games until the end of the year, and the battery life and price tag wouldn't work as a handheld that you could dock. No one would buy the dock seperately at 90 USD, and removing the dock only removes so much cost, maybe it'd be down to 250 which it eventually will be. But if they have a hybrid console, they can get rid of the faliure that the Wii U was, merge their software divisions and pump out more 1st party titles and provide enough content to boost sales for third parties to come over and port games to it, in the end creating the selling point of console games on one hybrid system that you can have at home and on the go at a price of one console. Nintendo themselves know this and Reggie himself has said it, and I agree with this strategy.
We don't know anything about the Switch's specs, it's unfair to judge it right now, a lot of people here believe it'll use an underclocked X1 even though it makes no sense for the form factor and is economically less viable now and even more in the long run, because it's Nintendo, though they've shown so far they can keep up with industry standards like microSD UHXC and USB-C, and with the Foxconn leak, Nathan and Game Informer heavily implying Pascal there's no reason for me to personally believe it's using Maxwell, but each to their own as everything is heavy speculation right now. The point being don't judge it basing off unconfirmed information.
PS4 PRO and XBOX Scorpio won't be an issue performance gap-wise, because all games for them work for the standard PS4 and XBONE, so downscaling and optimizing for the Switch shouldn't be that big of a problem at all, looking at the fact they were considering porting Titanfall 1 to the Vita and R* ported GTA V for the PS3 and X360, if it sells well they will spend the time and money.
You mention PS4 PRO being down to 350 during the holidays, though the Switch will very likely drop to 250 during the holidays too, that would sell like hot pancakes without an issue, especially with a bigger library and finalized online by then, that is if you want the hybrid form factor and/or Nintendo. So to sum up, no. Nintendo isn't out of the home console industry, you can't conclude that on unconfirmed information and opinions. The Switch is as much of a handheld as it is a home console. They have 50 billion dollars in the bank, so they aren't nowhere near going third party or selling out, they could go on 45+ years with them flopping hard yearly, and they have a fanbase, ideas and products that will keep them running no matter what. They're a smart company overall, very much so actually.
