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Kerotan on 24 September 2017
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the_dengle said:
Kerotan said:

Calm down there. 

 

I said if Nintendo want to prevent their gaming market size from declining they need to match those sales combined.  I never said it can't be a success if it sells less.  

 

And considering Switch has the ability to sell numbers equal to the combined totals it's definitely a fair comparison to make.  They are combined platforms into 1 after all. 

This is still dumb and nonsensical. Imagine a company manufactures separate refrigerators and freezers. They sell 500 freezers but only 100 refrigerators. Then they start making joint fridge/freezer units, and sell 550 of those. How can you make the case their “market size” declined without knowing the overlap between fridge & freezer buyers? If 60 of their sold fridges were bought by people who had also bought a freezer, their products were in 540 houses, not 600. They actually expanded their market with the new product.

Suppose also that freezers cost $170 and were sold at a loss while fridges cost $300 and were also sold at a loss, and that the new combined units were sold for a profit for $300. While not strictly related to market share, that would be a pretty significant detail to consider when evaluating the market’s response to these products. It would demonstrate, for example, that 600 sales of the older products (several of those being to repeat customers) would not be preferable to 550 sales of the new product, as not only would the market for accessories to these products be larger, but a greater profit would be made up-front.

That's one of the downsides to going the hybrid route.  They've basically accepted they can no longer do a handheld and a home console and have to accept the negative effect of both userbases consolidating.  That down side is a number of over lapping consumers will now only buy 1 console instead of 2.

 

So while their actual consumers stay the same (possibly),  the size of their market might shrink.  Now I can counter this with the Switch might be appealing enough as the amalgamation of 2 platforms to actually gain new consumers that a handheld or console on their own wouldn't have attracted. 

 

This is a positive in this comparison.  People think this is a play to try and say Nintendo's market continues to shrink but in reality the Switch has a fair chance to increase it. 

 

It's basically a gen over gen comparison for the company.  This gens handheld + portable (Switch)  vs last gens handheld + portable (Wii U/3DS). 

 

Same as you could say ps4 will be hoping to beat vita + ps3 by selling over 100m. Another comparison I think is fair and which it could pull off.