Nintendo is committing a lot of the same lethal mistakes they did with the WiiU, and more.

[Mnementh]

RolStoppable said:

Mnementh said:

I'm at this point not so sure if the categorization into generations makes sense outside of a manufacturer. Clearly the Switch is a uccessor to WiiU and 3DS, and is in the next generation. But putting it together with generations of other manufacturers might be troubling. This worked for a long time, as the main competitors always more or less matched their cycles. Sega was doing faster cycles, but they started later and had to catch up and later on they were thrown out as a main competitor.

But recently the cycles were going out of sync. While usually generations were around 6 years, the manufacturers started to differ. While the Wii lasted the usual 6 years (WiiU came 2012, Wii 2006), the main competitors PS3 and X306 lasted longer. The PS3 came 2006, but the PS4 was 2013, so 7 years later. The Xbox360 already released in 2005, the X1 in 2013, so it lasted even 8 years. Nintendo on the other hand cut their cycle short, the Switch now released 5 years after the WiiU (although you could argue it is in line with the 3DS). At this point we cannot be sure Switch will compete against PS5 (maybe Nintendo takes another short and Sony another long cycle), so putting it in the same generation is a bit early. At this point it is clear Switch will seriously compete against PS4, except Sony announces now PS5 and releases it next year. As PS4 still is selling well, I don't see that happening.

So Switch may or may not be later competing against PS5, but that only means the generations of the different manufacturers are overlapping.

The cycle has gone out of sync because Nintendo is the only company who didn't deviate from the norm. If you grant Sony the benefit of a long PS4 lifecycle, you should be consistent and do the same for Switch, especially because Switch sales do not point towards a short lifecycle.

Since Switch is also a 3DS successor, it creates some unique circumstances. For the past two generations, handhelds have launched notably earlier than the home consoles of the same generation, but handhelds also tend to get ignored, so quite a few people perceive Switch as too soon to be called 9th gen. The other big point is that Sony has been eliminated from the handheld market, so there's no counterpart to Nintendo's portable console anymore. The lack of such a competitor further fuels the perception that Switch isn't 9th gen, but you can't blame Nintendo for addressing the handheld market when it was time to introduce the next generation.

The reasons given for categorizing Switch as 8th gen are the same that would put the Dreamcast into gen 5. However, nobody has been logically consistent and called the Dreamcast 5th gen yet.

You are correct about generations overlapping more than in the past. That's the result of console gaming branching of into two different directions. On one hand you have Nintendo who still provide typical console gaming, on the other hand you have Sony and Microsoft who lured PC developers to consoles and step by step turned their consoles more into dumbed down PCs. Since the two paths are very different, it makes sense that generations do not align as tight anymore as they used to, because the underlying philosophies do not demand launches in close proximity of each other.

Well, you say it yourself, the generations don't line up. Therefore I see not much sense in declaring Switch in the same gen as PS4 or PS5. If we assume PS4 and Switch both follow a normal console-lifecycle, then Switch will be 2.5 years on market with PS4and 3.5 years with PS5. Declaring it to be in the same generation as either of them is illogical. As far as we know, both could deviate from the lifecylce again and making the differences even bigger.

Also Nintendo did deviate earlier, the GBA had only 3.5 years as the DS came out.