nanarchy said:
Soundwave said:
Yeah but reality tells a different story.
Wii did sell 100 million units. Where was all the magical developer support? They stayed with Sony + MS for the most part. Why? Because 160 million PS3s + 360s is more than 100 million Wiis. The only really "big" games the Wii maybe stole from the PS/XBox were Monster Hunter Tri and DQX (an online only game for Japan).
Sorry but I just don't see much difference from developers if it sells 40 million versus 80 million. The Wii had mediocre third party support even at 100 million and with the PS4 + XB1 at almost 100 million shipped already there's just no way any studio could rationally justify supporting the Switch with a "big" game over those platforms.
As Nintendo fans we've been sold this whole "well you better hope & stress about the system selling great becauze you need good sales for good developer support" ... but the fact is it's largely crap.
The 3DS even has quite frankly somewhat assy third party support, it has 4-5 big Japanese IP sure, but it's real slim pickings after that. And that's at 65 million now. How much does it need to sell to get "good" developer support? 85 million? 100 million?
Developers really can't devote too much resources to the Switch. There's too many PS4/XB1 owners already to ignore on top of the fact that there's PC users also and porting between those three platforms is easy (x86 PC GPU based basically). For portable games most developers, even Japanese ones, are chasing the mobile money train as their first priority these days. There's just no changing these two issues, and as such I don't think it really matters all that much if Switch sells 40-50 million say instead of 80-85 million.
The games you get are largely going to be exactly the same as a gamer. The developers who are willing to buy in to what Nintendo is doing will be there at 30/40/50 million. The ones who aren't would only change their mind if it was an astronomical success like 100-150 million and even then they likely would "wait and see" for about 1-3 years, and then require another 1-2 years to finally release anything. It's not worth stressing over a a Nintendo fan, this whole cat & mouse sales game is largely bullshit. As long as the system does "ok" it's good enough, it doesn't really change much if goes above that.
|
Wii may have sold 100m, but a massive portion were casuals. The casual market is gone and it aint coming back combined with a rapidly fleeing handheld market, nintendo need to pick up more of the gamers and to do that they need 3rd party support which turn requires a large enough userbase of gamers to justify the risk and investment.
|
It will still never happen, ARM + mobile Tegra chip means a developer realistically has to choose between making a game for the Switch primarily versus making one for PS4 + XB1/Scorpio + PC ... and Switch is never going to have more users, certainly not any time soon, even if it sold like the Wii it would take until like 2020 or 2021 to catch where the PS4 alone is today and that's assuming not a single person on the planet ever buys a PS4 after today.
None of this stuff is realistic. Developers at best may opt to make a version of a game for Switch but that will also be on the PS4/XB1/PC unless Nintendo pays for the development costs, which isn't going to happen much as Nintendo is a business not a charity, and said ports to the PS4/XB1/PC will likely be better versions because of better hardware.
The 3DS has 65 million and quite frankly for that number of users the third party support is mediocre aside from 3 big Japanese IP really. This is largely because of mobile too I think, too many devs even Japanese ones would rather chase the mobile money market rather than bother with traditional mobile games at 4800-6800 yen a pop.
Given these realities as a Nintendo fan, really why even worry about all this crap? Just enjoy the Switch. As long as it doesn't flop and sells enough for a Switch 2 or whatever, that's good enough, if the 3DS can't even get great developer support a 65 million, the Switch is likely not going to do much better than that if at all. It's not worth getting upset about or worrying about.
