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Johnw1104 on 18 September 2017
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RolStoppable said:
Johnw1104 said:

Those are two very different markets. The attraction of the more expensive option is that it can play console quality games and (hopefully) continue to receive 3rd party ports of contemporary AAA titles. There are no such expectations for the 3DS, with its library being tailor made specifically for the 3DS itself.

That's wrong.

You are assigning weight to AAA third party titles when Switch has been selling well without any AAA third party games being present on the system. There is a glaring lack of evidence for your claim that current and future Switch owners consider AAA third party games an essential part of the system.

Well yeah, we won't really have CONCRETE evidence for a few years of what the deciding factors were among Switch owners. We're projecting here, though, so we mostly have past experiences to base our assumptions on.

 

I think the importance of 3rd party support will vary by region. In my mind, Nintendo can provide enough for Japan on their own with just some support from franchises like Monster Hunter to keep them interested. In NA and Europe, though, third party has always been more important.

 

Many, if not most console players in the west spend the majority of their time playing multiplats. It's a rare day that I see anyone on my PS4 friend list playing a platform exclusive and, thinking back to the previous gen, there again we saw people primarily playing 3rd party games with a mix of exclusives. It's the CoDs, BFs, ACs, FIFA/madden/nba2ks, GTAs and so forth that the more casual gamers, who make up most of the community, spend most of their time playing.

 

Dating back to the failure of the Turbografx in NA from a lack of 3rd party support (whereas with such support it was hugely successful in Japan), we have seen time after time in the console market that access to the big AAA multiplats is generally very important as far as selling beyond those initial enthusiasts is concerned. There have been exceptions, mainly the Wii which appealed to non-gamers and still had (often crappy) third party support, but that does not seem to be the norm. The excitement Switch owners are showing towards getting some support is rather revealing, and at the very least continued support raises the ceiling for the Switch in the long run.

 

The portability factor seems like the key feature that has finally allowed Nintendo to provide a console which is not as expensive but still worth purchasing multiplats for. I know I personally am excited about buying multiplats on a Nintendo system for the first time since the Gamecube, and have seen on YouTube and even among a few friends that the notion of carrying FIFA or NBA2K around with them is very attractive. 

 

So basically, third party support raises the ceiling and helps appeal to gamers who haven't played a Nintendo title in years. If this first wave sells well I suspect the support will be here to stay, so hopefully they do wind up selling.