PS4/XBO/NS - 2019 vs 2020; WEEK FIFTY-THREE!! GAME! SET! MATCH!

[Bofferbrauer2]

padib said:

PAOerfulone said:

The Nintendo console crowd isn't is big as you think it is. It went from 61 million (NES) to 49 million (SNES) to 33 million (N64) to 21 million (GCN) to a dismal 13.5 million (Wii U). The Wii, (And to a lesser degree, the DS) was an outlier where they had the perfect strategy and caught lightening in a bottle with the Blue Ocean, casual crowd. A crowd that quickly abandoned them once smartphone/mobile gaming exploded. An explosion that came at the expense of the handheld gaming market. Not only has Nintendo's handheld crowd evaporated drastically, so has the overall handheld gaming audience. We went from 154 million DS units (235 million DS/PSP units) to just 76 million 3DS units (92 million 3DS/PSV units). 

Really, Nintendo's console and handheld crowd, or what's left of it from 7th gen, is more or less the combined install base of the 3DS and Wii U, which doesn't even crack 90 million. And if combined the 3DS' peak year (13.95 million units shipped in FY 2013) and the Wii U's peak year (3.37 million units shipped in FY 2015), that wouldn't even add up to 18 million. (Just 17.32 million combined units). It'll take A LOT more than just Nintendo's console and handheld crowds to come close to sniffing 30 million. 

As for your statement that I bolded. Again, that was the Wii, and to a lesser degree, the DS, selling to an extremely casual segment of the overall gaming audience that wasn't going to be held over for long, and it came back to bite them in the ass when mobile gaming took off and that very same audience left them for dead with the 3DS and Wii U. 

Granted, even if some of that audience has started to come back due to the pandemic, how many of them can we really expect there to be? The audience is just not there the way they used to be. 

Nah, it doesn't work like that. The 3DS and WiiU are outliers in that they are consoles with sever design flaws which hampered sales. The WiiU is the most obvious one, it's popularity was at an all-time low and was essentially a failure, even admitted so by Reggie after he retired (in other words of course).

No the reality is a mix of what you're saying and the potential of Nintendo consoles, when they are properly designed, and the sales potential of their IPs. The idea is that the handheld and home console line were capable of selling much more, but that the consoles that sold less did so due to a design problem or due to increased competition. Let me prove it:

• SNES: Did not enjoy the monopoly that Nintendo had with the NES. The reasons for this you can research I won't do an exposé.
• GBA: Same idea as the SNES, with competition from Bandai (Wonderswan Color) and Sony (PSP, at the tail end of the GBA).
• N64: lost the support of many top-tier developers, and their series main entries, due to choosing a cartridge-based format
• GC: Chose a custom mini-DVD format, and the purple lunch-box design alienated gamers who prefered the PS or Xbox brands. The PS2 was also the follow-up to the most popular console of the previous gen, and had all the big 3rd party exclusives at the time. The GC launced some controversial sequels (Zelda:WW, Mario Sunshine)
• WiiU: Suffered from aweful identity issues (was it a Wii, was it a U, was it a tablet), and severe design issues (battery life on tablet, not being able to play on the go, confusion with only 1 tablet allowed per WiiU, etc.)
• 3DS: Suffered from a serious design flaw in the 3D screen, forcing Nintendo to produce a version free of 3D. But the damage had been done.

The consoles that worked:

• NES: Perfect design at the time, and great focus on hand-picked quality titles that made the library top-notch (in contrast with the crumbled ruins of the gaming industry just prior)
• Wii: Lightning in a bottle. The motion controls made a lot of noise, the game launched with Twilight Princess, the highly awaited successor to OoT, and the virtual console (novel at the time) allowed people to dive back into NES classics (yes the NES that is in this same list)
• DS: Same idea as the wii, but with a stylus-enabled dual-screen setup instead of motion controls. The DSLite was a bombshell.
• Gameboy: Same as the NES, but portable! So even better

So, well guess what. The Switch fits in list #2.

What does that mean? It means that the Switch is not only a sexy bombshell, but it also has the benefit of a combined library. Which means it has the potential to sell over 200m units in its lifetime. Proof of this is in the huge boost in sales of series like Animal Crossing, Smash and Mario Kart as compared to past generations. Games that used to sell 10m now sell 20m (Smash). Games that used to sell 8m now sell 17m (BotW).

I removed everything else because I agreed with almost everything.

Wait,wait, wait, the GBA didn't work?

GBA was a great success. It just got cut short as Nintendo panicked when Sony announced their PSP and rushed to release the DS. GBA wasn't killed by lack of success, but simply bad timing, meaning it got severely cut short. It was only on the market for 3.5 years before it's successor, the DS, came out.

Also, your assessment of the SNES is flawed in a myopic way. The NES had never had a monopoly either in the first place (it didn't have much to fear in the US or Japan, but fierce competition in Europe with the Sega Master System), but saying the SNES didn't work because it had competition is like saying the only reason why the PS3 only sold 80M would be because the 360 existed, excluding all it's other blunders. SNES did work, but just looking from a purely north american standpoint can make you easily think it was underwhelming in terms of sales, excluding several factors along the way.

Also, to get back on the NES, the videogame market only crashed in North America, it stayed very healthy in Europe and Japan. I mean, that's the very reason why Nintendo even could start selling the NES in the US in the first place, because their videogame market didn't crash.