| zorg1000 said: GBA, DS, Wii & 3DS all had good-great 3rd party support but very few of those titles would be considered AAA while GC & Wii U had a much higher emphasis on AAA multiplats and did poorly which proves that AAA 3rd party games are not required for Nintendo hardware to be successful. |
I chose your reply to accumulate my responses to several posts on this theme as I think it can drill into the root issue that I'm trying to get at.
What do GBA, DS, and 3DS have in common?
#1 : Cheap Games. $20-$30 for most new games, with some coming in at $35-$40 initially.
#2 : Cheap Systems. No handheld has ever sold well at prices north of $199 USD. Affordable to get into.
#3 : Quick dev time. Games for Nintendo handhelds from the Gameboy days all the way to n3DS have been on simple hardware with low resolutions and not a lot of fancy tricks to deal with. Even the 2nd screen for DS/3DS is really just another low-resolution extension of the main screen. So, it's easy to crank out a ton of content using small teams. This is fantastic, because risk is low, and tons of content can get on the shelves and online store rapidly.
#4 : NO real competition. The most credible of all time was the PSP, followed by the Game Gear. Both of these exposed a basic problem though : in handheld console competition, you want to be cheap and have plenty of games. PSP was more expensive than the Nintendo competition, and had a fraction of the games.
So, if Nintendo can present the Switch as grabbing the torch of Nintendo handheld mainline gaming, AND get a mass-market handheld price (sub-$200), AND get a big flow of the kind of titles that sustained those previous hit systems, then they can sell a healthy amount of Switches.
I absolutely do think they need a smaller, more sleek model to really hit the bigtime though. Switch as it is, it's a bit too bulky/cumbersome to be a pocketable/easy to deal with device. That will almost certainly happen down the line.
On the flipside, if they are trying to meet higher price v price with Sony/MS and present the Switch as a home console, I just really doubt that it will work out well for them.
People simply have different expectations of handheld gaming vs. home console gaming.
I think that they will more than likely lower the price, get new SKUs out, and have a strong non-AAA library built up on this thing. Game pricing will be something to consider. It's absolutely fine for games like BOTW and 3D Mario to be $59 full-priced games. However, 2D marios, the kind of stuff that DS/3DS have gotten for years, those need to be $25-$40. Changing $59 for many of those kinds of games might limit the appeal of the system.
Wii I covered earlier. It's timeframe, early success followed by a steep decline, launching at excellent pricing vs unestablished super expensive Gen7 competition, and the initial motion controls/fitness craze are not elements that are likely to be repeated anytime soon. WiiU was a better Wii, and it was a disaster because the market wasn't the same.
