Does It Really Matter How Much Switch Sells?

[flashfire926]

Soundwave said:

flashfire926 said:
You're right imo. The only difference we will see is the amount of shovelware and the length of the console's life(seeing that the flop Wii u got replaced in a mere 4.5 years)

Shorter hardware cycles aren't even a bad thing. Like I said because Wii U wasn't a success means I get to play Zelda: BotW with better graphics next month and get to take that game on a 9 hour airplane trip I have scheduled. 

This wouldn't be available to me or anyone else if Wii U was successful and had a full 5-6 year cycle ... so again, why as a consumer is this supposed to be "bad"? If you really love Nintendo games you were going to have to buy the successor hardware eventually anyway. You're just getting access to your favorite Nintendo IP with better hardware sooner rather than later, which improves the play experience. Nintendo's always used better hardware to improve their games.

In fact I might suggest that maybe we have been looking at the whole life cycle thing all wrong. 4 year cycles are good, especially if Nintendo is going to cut the crap and just start delivering the big games right from the get go. Since Nintendo doesn't really embrace the highest end hardware, shorter life cycles but with more condensed game releases may be better anyway. Lets be honest, once Nintendo "blows their load" of their main IP on any console (usually by year 3 or 4) they kinda go into "vacation mode", Wii's year 5 and 6 were shit. For a company like Sony 5-6-7 year cycles make sense because they have every developer making games for them, but for Nintendo shorter cycles may well make more sense.

As long as Nintendo is bringing in enough money to keep their small-ish company going at a healthy clip ... and they seem very adept at making good profits (see their last quarter), this is not really something to worry about either. Nintendo is very efficient at making more than enough profit to get by and they keep their company foot print small so it's easy to rack up profit, especially with extra profit now coming in from mobile. They made billions during the GameCube era, they'll be just fine financially with Switch + Mobile + Theme Parks + Movies as long as they don't something stupid like take hardware losses. 

True. It's the same thing with me: I wouldn't be able to get BOTW if it was only Wii u, which I'm happy it wasn't. However Switch only came so early because of Wii u's failure. The consumers who got a Wii u and expected more out of it. However "vacation mode" took place too early in 2016. Zelda is now on the Switch, too, and that version is clearly going to overshadow the Wii u version. Wii u has been dead since 2016 started.

So yeah, the shorter lifecycle for Wii u is great four you and me, but bad for anyone who bought a Wii u.

Dreamcast was a failure (not because it was bad) and lasted two years

Xbox 360 was the breakthrough success for Microsoft, and lasted eight years (look at the difference between GTA 4 and GTA 5) and consisted of many awesome games throughout it's years.