Pyro as Bill said:
As far as CoD, FIFA, Minecraft, GTA online(possibly) go it's the closest thing to a portable PS4/PS3/X360/XB1/PC. Nintendo handhelds can do ~70M minimum. HH/home libraries are combined and any doubles become DLC/new IPs ie Mario Kart home + Mario Kart portable become a single Mario Kart and a new IP or DLC. For Nintendo IPs we now get the HQ version. There's a good possibility we'll see the return of motion controlled sports/fitness games and this time they'll be portable. Ignore the 'Wii Fit cazualz now play Candy Crush instead' myth. Would 3DS have sold better if it had TV-out, better graphics, a mainline Zelda, local multiplayer CoD, FIFA, Minecraft and a respectable sequel to Wii Sports/Fit? Add the fact that it's Nintendo. They can suprise everyone and pull a megahit out of nowhere. |
And how big exactly is the portable market for CoD, FIFA and GTA? What little data we have suggests it's beyond tiny, and then there's the added risk that developers will simply pull these franchises away from the platform if and when their software sales tank and the added cost of adapting a Switch version isn't deemed worth it. Minecraft is big, true, but the sales are divided anywhere from 19% (Asia) to 41% for consoles (North America) and that includes all platforms. Meanwhile, the game isn't even available on 3DS and has sold about 2.5 million on Vita, so out of about 123 million sales, 2.5 million are on handheld... That's not a massive market by any means so it's a completely irrelevant argument.
"Nintendo handhelds can do ~70M minimum" As the 7th and 8th should have taught us by now, the gaming market doesn't follow out silly "rules" such as this one. It may have been close to accurate when mobile was not a factor, but this is just yet another "the same console manufacturer always wins two generations in a row", "the most powerful console never wins", "high hardware sales equal great 3rd party support", "the market leader never releases their next console first" or any number of similar, nonsensical rules we've made up over the year, all of which have been shamed one by one. There's also the added fact that dedicated handheld platforms have suffered a historically massive decline following a similarly massive increase with PSP and DS, handheld consoles are less important that they have been since the early 2000's or perhaps far back into the 90's (which is extremely telling) and the trend was only partly battled by releasing, in practice, one new revision every single year and seriously slashing prices. Again, this is a non-argument.
As far as combining libraries; the same first party franchises were available on 3DS and Wii U that you could get on Wii and DS, and yet the former pair managed a fraction of the software sales and will end up below or around 1/3 of the combined hardware installed base. So combining two into one won't automatically improve sales beyond this, there's no logic in that, especially seeing the price tag which makes the Switch a very expensive handheld, alternately a home console priced similar to the competition but with much less power and developer support. Yet another poor argument in the big picture. Not to mention dual-ownership, which is quite common.
Motion controlled fitness games making a comeback? Why on earth would that happen? Or do you see people buying full-priced motion controlled games for Switch to use in some form of bulky handheld mode when there are completely free apps with features the Switch can't offer due to the lack of functions such as cameras, 4G connections and GPS? That's beyond ridiculous, fitness games are the least likely to succeed of any concept on any console today. Oh, and your myth about Wii Fit gamers playing Candy Crush is not only one that's never been uttered by me or anyone else; it's also completely backwards, these people are using cheap or free mobile fitness apps... Obviously. This is just yet another sign that you see the market with wishing goggles rather than a critically thinking set of trained eyes.
Would the 3DS have sold better? No idea, it would certainly have cost a lot more, and it barely moved at its original launch price, so there is that. It's all hypothetic hindsight though, and is, unsurprisingly, yet again a useless argument in this context (but a fairly interesting idea). Having the bigger franchises on a handheld doesn't mean all that much either, the Vita had a lot of these big titles and it still sold like something close to the opposite of its hilarious name.
Look; I'm not saying that I have to be right, but it strikes me that most of the arguments for a huge, Wii-like success for the Switch is based on flimsy grounds and made up "rules", a lot of suppositions and wishes and desires rather than a cold, hard look at market realities. There is no logical grounds for thinking 100 million hardware sales by what we've seen or know, there just isn't. And mega hits don't just "come out of nowhere", they are a result of riding trends, striking broad and solvent audiences and offering a somewhat lasting appeal. There's a huge chasm between "I want this to happen" and "This is likely to happen due to market circumstances and current and impending movements", as of today, March 21st 2017, there is very little basis for the latter but there's a whole lot of the former going on. A lof of people in here seem hell bent on "revenge" for the poor Wii U sales and the massive decline between the DS and 3DS, and that's probably a lot of the reasoning behind these immense predictions, there are very few other explanations for it.
