| Nem said: Well... the Switch itself looks to be sucessful so far. But, what is it? For a home console it's doing well. For a portable it's doing expectadly. But what does it mean to the Nintendo overall market? If Nintendo comes out with another portable then it's safe to say that the switch is a sucess over the Wii U. But if this is all that Nintendo is releasing, it may represent a continued drop in size of the Nintendo market (home console + portable). If the switch is the only system, it will have to be compared to WiiU+3DS to measure how sucessful it really is for Nintendo. |
I think Nintendo's play here will be to effectively throw out the generational model and basically sell different generations of Switch side by side, but keeping the ecosystem more or less unifed between devices.
This effectively can give them something close to the old "two hardware line" setup of the past, but without forcing a huge split in developer resources because they could still likely just scale (at least their 1st/2nd party games) up and down to work on both Switch lines.
So I think 3DS/2DS will be phased out entirely in a couple of years, and then the current Switch, the one that is now $300, will in some redesigned form become a budget model, and Nintendo will introduce a newer, higher end Switch to re-occupy the $300 price point (w/XB1 tier graphics) and these two will co-exist and share games. As times goes on there may be more specific games for the higher end model.
I think Nintendo purposely chose a non-modified Tegra X1 for this exact reason, so they can easily adopt new Tegra chips when Nvidia releases them. If Nintendo had done what they usually do which is insist on a custom design, there would be problems in having an "upgraded" Switch later, because Nvidia would have to make a custom design from scratch for them to keep compatbility with the old Switch.
Just my hunch, we'll see how it plays out though.
