| kenjab said: What I find interesting is that nearly everyone in this thread thought Switch would ONLY succeed if it got portable titles like Pokemon and Animal Crossing so they could be played on a TV. But it's been a success before those games even came out. What's made Switch successful, IMO, is the opposite: that it had home console quality games like BotW, Mario Odyssey, and Splatoon 2 available on a portable device. We all underestimated how much of a hook that would turn out to be. And having two legit GOY candidates come out in the first 8 months helps too. |
It's absolutely true that the selling power of home console quality games (relatively) on a handheld was a point that was massively underestimated, which is surprising given that it was well acknowledged as it's main selling point and a lot of the "optimistic" predictions at the time (50M+) were mostly formed out of that fact.
Personally though, I think the most underestimated factor was just the hardware. Playstation and Xbox fans like to generalize the Nintendo audience as not caring about hardware, but since 99% of the market for all consoles is casual gamers, having hardware that is both sleek, easy to use, easy on the eyes, and powerful enough to actually carry out it's selling point (unlike say the Vita) makes all the difference. It wasn't a plastic piece of turd like the fisher price tablet. Nintendo's best selling consoles are always the ones that almost perfect their concept, relative to the time (Gameboy, Gameboy Advance, DS, Wii)
