| RolStoppable said: While I chose to quote your post, my response is more of a general one to the thread as a whole. The gaming landscape has been changing since a while, so the setup on the frontpage of three home consoles and two handheld consoles, each with their own marketshare total, has to change eventually too. The old binary does not exist anymore. Sony has exited the handheld market while Nintendo has combined home console and handheld into one. That leaves one console for each of the three manufacturers, so the frontpage image will have to be reduced to three bars that divide the marketshare between them. Nintendo has quit neither the home console or handheld market because they remain in both. Developers of Switch games don't have to ask themselves whether they are making a home console or handheld game, because what they develop is both at once. The handheld-only Switch Lite isn't going to change anything for developers, so it makes sense to count the Switch family of systems as a singular entity and thus determine Nintendo's marketshare that way. That's why all sales trackers will combine sales of Switch and Switch Lite. The efforts to split hairs and try to group Nintendo separately in their entirety or only partially are indeed in vein. You emphasized the word "dedicated" in your post, but all that "dedicated" really refers to is a device where the entire or at least primary purpose is to play video games. Since Switch is a dedicated gaming device (actually moreso than PS and Xbox consoles) and has full home console functionality, it's wrong to say that Nintendo has dropped out of the dedicated home console business. All one can say is that Nintendo isn't making a stationary home console anymore, but that's a meaningless distinction when Switch can do everything that the consoles that came before it could do. |
Agreed. I see zero reason to not combine sales of Switch and Switch Lite.
Though in that case, it'd make sense for VGC to drop the separation of home console and handheld market share and just compare Ninty/Sony/MS.
Last edited by Replicant - on 30 September 2019
