Nintendo systems and "lack" of competition

[Bofferbrauer2]

Wyrdness said:
First party games have always sold well since the NES so the lack of competition argument is a load of bull, for reference third parties for decades have complained how hard it is to compete against the first party titles.

Well, it depends a bit on the game.

Mario Tennis Aces: Can you even tell me any other tennis game that came out this gen? Or any other arcadey sports title for that matter (Golf Story is the only other title that comes to my mind - and that one is both based on Mario Golf and a Switch exclusive)? These are things that got very hard to find outside of Nintendo.

Jump&Runs: While there is some nice resurgence here with the rereleases of Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, with Sonic Mania and several indie Titles (A Hat in Time, Shovel Knight, Freedom Planet...), the genre itself mostly survived due to Nintendo, thus having the majority of the fanbases on their platforms.

Mario Kart: Similar to the above, arcade racers mainly survived due to this series, thus again accumulating most of it's fanbase.

Splatoon: A very different and fresh take on the FPS/TPS genres, one which at your normal publishers certainly would have been dismissed in an instant. It shows that unconventional ideas can not only be pulled of with great success, but that there are audiences which aren't covered by the games the publishers offer.

Labo: Who else would have greenlit something like that?

ARMS and Smash: Both are pretty different takes on the fighter genres. Smash wasn't even expected to succeed, but it became a, ahem, Smash hit despite being so unconventional as both platform fighters and mascot fighters were virtually unknown before the first one and most of these nowadays try to copy Smash in some way or another

And then there's the thing that most of these series are decades old, thus having built up a fanbase over many years and entries.

In any other case however, they have to compete with all their competitors on equal footing (save for shoehorning Mario characters into a game for brand recognition). Third parties complaining mostly because they competed with sub-par games in the ballpark of Nintendo games - things that just can't go over well.

Last edited by Bofferbrauer2 - on 25 December 2018