| invetedlotus123 said: Switch sales are great also because of the flux of great games, but its also about the hardware, the console itself being interesting and Nintendo marketing it right. The console being exciting is very important, look to what happened to Wii U, great games but lackluster sales. Also look to Xbox One, a great console, a promising line-up but everything was blown up because terrible business decisions that drove possible buyers away and even wtih loads of effort from MS it couldnt revert the initial damage. |
I have to disagree on this. There a lot of several factors that can impact console sales.
As for WiiU:
1) It is the worst Nintendo console in terms of games lineup. It’s launch lineup of games was bad as well. They’ve had zombiu, Nintendo land and probably some mario game. I don’t remember exactly. In terms of third as was already mentioned they’ve had old 360/PS3 games. Also this games were the so-called worst versions. If i’m not mistaken black ops 2 was 30 FPS game on wiiu. Not surprised almost nobody bought it. To be honest if it wasn’t for super smash, splatoon and Mario Kart I think wiiu wouldn’t have reached even 10 million lifetime.
2) The name. Nothing to say here. A lot of consumers thought it was a wii addon.
3) The point that I’m surprised nobody mentioned here. But back in 2012 wiiu had a massive problem with day 1 patch. It was required to download day 1 patch in order to use a console. And for some reason the update process took almost 1,5 hours and if for some reason the power went off in your house during this process, the console would brick. There was a lot of negative PR created by this. So I think that is also a reason why wiiu sold that bad
As for Xbox One:
1) Always online and DRM stuff. While I understand why Microsoft wanted to try this. They probably want to get rid of physical distribution because it costs money to print discs. Also this worked well with steam on pc. Though it turned out that console gamers aren’t big fans of digital distribution like pc gamers so it didn’t work out.
2) Focus on TV and entertainment. That’s simple. It was really stupid from MS to go after this crowd with 500$ price tag. It is just too expensive for them. Though if Xbox One would have cost 300$ or less I think they’ve really had a chance to sell it to this casual crowd as a media entertainment system and even probably reach the desired 200 million sales.
3) Architecture. ESRAM was a big mistake. Xbox One x shows that MS themselves understand this. Also this gen is the first time Sony were able to make a better console architecture-wise.
4) The main problem why I think Xbox One sells bad everywhere except US and UK. It was only released in 20 countries or so in 2013. In the rest of the world even in a lot of European countries it released in September 2014. This gave PS4 almost a 1-year head start. To be honest everything about Xbox One release makes me think that MS planned it to release in 2014 but they rushed it to the market when they’ve found out that Sony will release PS4 in 2013. MS just didn’t want to give Sony one year advantage so bad.
As for switch and PS4. These consoles didn’t have such big problems so no surprise they sell that good.
