the_dengle said:
It's an inherently flawed perspective because it assumes that Switch owners are buying Zelda because they have no choice rather than people buying Switches because they want to play Zelda. The "nothing else to buy" argument never made sense. It didn't apply last year when Wii U owners passed up Star Fox and Paper Mario despite having literally nothing else to buy and it doesn't apply this year with PS4 versions of Tom Clancy, For Honor, Mass Effect, and every other multiplatform game selling much better on PS4 than on XBO despite the PS4 also having several big exclusives while the XBO has had none. There isn't some invisible upper limit of game sales. Zelda didn't take a big hit when Mario Kart released. |
It's only flawed if you believe one variable being larger than another makes the latter irrelevant, which is not the case. I'm making no claims as to specifically how significant a variable it is (i don't believe we have enough data to come to firm conclusions, outside of "it clearly does something"), nor am i saying people are only buying Zelda because they don't have any choice. What i am saying is that if they had more choice, Zelda's sales could be lower. If the Switch launched with 10 AAA Nintendo games, do you think Zelda would have sold identically up until now? Either it would have sold less, or the other 9 would suffer in some capacity from Zelda's presence. I think we can agree the alternative (that people would buy all of the ones they want at the same time) isn't probably, and if that's the case you agree it's a relevant variable. I don't care if you think it's a small one, that's for you to judge, my problem is just someone dismissing it entirely.
If a PS4 game sells poorly we don't use that as proof that install base doesn't matter, so why would we claim a WiiU game selling poorly during a drought means library size doesn't? Just because another variables can trump it (in both those examples popularity), doesn't mean they aren't relevant, nor the dozens of others involved (marketing, digital, inaccurate sales tracking, critical reception, etc). As i said, for all we know Zelda might have done even better with a different combination of variables.
