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I don't think so. The typical serious AAA online/single player games have never been what drives Nintendo's business. Nintendo has always found MUCH more success with quirky titles and/or those with strong local multiplayer.

 

The problem with most AAA games is that they're not built to appeal to the Nintendo fanbase which has. From the beginning, thrived on the aforementioned two types of content: quirky and local multiplayer - those games that do both (Mario Kart, Just Dance, New Super Mario Bros, etc...) thrive; and these qualities are what generally make up Nintendo's top 200 most successful games. In addition, when these quirkier games are multiplatform, they tend to do better on the Nintendo console while the non-quirky single player/online experience tend to do better on other platforms. If you can get one of the two down, there's a chance that the game will do very well: GE007 is an example of this, although it has its fair share of quirkiness. Most AAA games focus on being as devoid of quirkiness and have poor/limited to no local multiplayer. Look at all the quirky million+ sellers on Wii, DS, NES, SNES, and Switch - the closest thing Switch has to a well performing non-quirky single player game is Skyrim which is 11th.

I don't think there's any reason for major focus in this area. It's nice to have ports of stuff, obviously, but to say Nintendo NEEDS these sort of serious single/online multiplayer AAA games conflicts with what's worked for them for their entire 35+ year history as a videogame company.

Fortnite is an online multiplayer game that I can actually see being a success, on the otherhand, but also kind of a good fit with Nintendo because of its quirkier nature. I do think that it's not perfect, if someone could nail that style of game with an even quirkier nature and local multiplayer, I can see it go really far on the Switch.

And honestly, I don't think big AAA titles is what Nintendo needs this year; what I do think they need are the smaller more creative games that expand the sort of genres and sub-genres on Switch; those along the lines of Professor Layton, Animal Crossing, Barbarosa's Treasure, Muramasa the Demon Blade, Endless Ocean, Rune Factory Frontier, Little King Story, Space Station Silicon Valley, Earthbound, and that sort of game. A lot of the more quirky niche types that work to expand the sort of content that's on the Switch, stuff for people to write about and say "Hey, there's some really cool hidden gems on this console."

As down as people are about the Pokemon game with the random encounter mechanic replaced with something different, this is exactly the sort of game I want to play on the Switch with my wife and kids. I understand it's probably not going to be the coolest game on the fifth grader playground, but I don't give a shit about that, I'm almost 40 =P
Even though I'm not a fan of Smash, that's a great one, Animal Crossing would be fantastic this year, Fire Emblem WOULD have been great if it made it into this year... essentially content like that is what I think this period needs more of. A huge Zelda-caliber game seems to be the sort of thing 2019 needs, that combined with a Pokemon RPG that expands on the original concept rather than making a clone of it could potentially shoot Switch into the 22-25M realm in 2019 in combination with the games that are pushed out of the 2018 schedule.

Last edited by Jumpin - on 27 July 2018

I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.