Will the Nintendo Switch overtake the PS4 in terms of sales worldwide?

[The_Liquid_Laser]

Jumpin said:

Wman1996 said:

Actually the Master System was more capable than the NES. It may not have been a success, but it was not as big of a failure as the Atari 7800 and the very obscure 3rd Gen consoles. But power tends to not be the deciding factor for console sales.

The SNES is the only time I can think of where the most powerful console of a gen (again when looking at the heavier hitters in sales at the time) won the gen. 

Atari 2600 wasn't the most powerful, NES wasn't the most powerful, SNES was the most powerful (minus obscure outliers like the Neo Geo), PS1 wasn't the most powerful, PS2 wasn't the most powerful, Wii wasn't the most powerful.

Eighth gen is more complicated. Base PS4 is more powerful than the Xbox One. But the Xbox One X is more powerful than the PS4 Pro.

All this to say the fourth gen and kind of eighth gen are the only times the powerful console won.

Thanks.

It should be noted that power was never a key feature with the NES as it competed with the Master System that was roughly 3X more powerful. Not to mention 25 of the 42 million NESs sold outside of Japan occurred AFTER the launch of the Mega Drive.

Another thing to note is that due to the late release of the SNES, it was actually not as powerful as contemporary devices coming out around that time, and possessed specifications only slightly better than the Mega Drive released years earlier (the Mega Drive's CPU was actually double the power of the SNES's, but it was bottlenecked by the number of cycles; that is, without the Sega CD's processor which was 4X the clockspeed of the SNES). The SNES lifespan was cut short because 32-bit consoles were announced about 2 years after it launched, and released a year later.

It's also false to say the Wii was the first time Nintendo didn't play the clockspeed game. The lateral design philosophy of Gunpei Yokoi was introduced in the 1970s - or rather, a philosophy which states that it's in creative design in other (less pricey for devs and consumers) directions can be compelling too. The Gameboy ran on this philosophy and sold the most hardware of any dedicated gaming console in Nintendo's history before the DS released, another console which also followed this philosophy.

The Wii was simply the result of one of Yokoi's disciples, Genyo Takeda, who applied the lateral hardware design philosophy to their home console market after two colossal failures with the N64 and Gamecube. The same philosophy worked again with the Switch - a cheaper console which uses other mans (other than expensive chipsets) to make it compelling.

Anyway, to explain Yokoi's philosophy a little further, he believed in using cheap, often older, components to make a more desirable device. The "lateral" part of the equation is designing it with a new sort of approach in mind in order to make it compelling (such as dpad interface, motion control interface, portability, hybridization, and touchscreens). It generally worked out well - his major failure was VR.

The NES uses this philosophy too, even though it wasn't designed by Yokoi.  His philosophy kind of became Nintendo's default hardware philosphy during the 80's.  The Famicom (family computer) was meant to be a computer in the living room.  Nintendo intentionally made it a lot cheaper than other new computers at the time.  It was cheap by Japanese standards.  

Meanwhile in the US, the console market crashed and the Commodore 64 became the most popular gaming device.  It's successor, the Amiga, was a 16-bit computer that launched around the same time as the NES.  Amiga sales were not anywhere near what C64 sales were.  It got clobbered by the NES, an 8-bit device.

Nintendo has a long history of using cheap hardware and beating the competition.  This goes back to the NES and Gameboy (and earlier through Yokoi's designs).  However, they have also made systems that were considered powerful for their day like the SNES, N64 and Gamecube.