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curl-6 on 10 August 2020
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Soundwave said:
curl-6 said:

Nobody said it was easy, but it is possible. This idea that a console must end with two years of weak support for its predecessor to succeed is silly, especially in the case of the Wii where games cheap to make.

It's difficult I think. Even like I said with the Switch, I mean the launch year was great, but again, you take away several repurposed Wii U titles and it's not really anywhere near as impressive of a launch window and probably couldn't even launch at all until Mario Odyssey was ready. The last time Nintendo really, truly had a great all around launch without benefit of taking games from a previous system was really maybe the SNES, almost 30 years ago. 

For Nintendo I think it is simply a better rule of thumb to err on the side of caution and ensure the console to come (whatever it is) always takes priority. 

Gamers are not loyal to you or your friends even your so-called "loyalists" will fuck you hard the second you ask for some patience with a new system. No one ever wants to hear "can you please just give us a few months to get Mario Kart 7 and Mario 3D Land ready and not bail out on us, please?".

There is very little residual bounce or goodwill for past performance when you have a lukewarm or bad launch. 

I mean shit even the Super NES ... Nintendo had a virtual monopoly on the game market and were at peak top of the world in summer/fall 1990 thanks to the unprecedented launch of Super Mario Bros. 3. People even just as blanket term referred to all video games as just "Nintendo" ("little Johnny is playing Nintendo", even if he's playing an arcade game).

Even with Super Mario World and Nintendo promising a new Zelda just a few months later and several other pretty good launch games, Sega from out of fucking nowhere suddenly by holiday 1991 is giving Nintendo a major problem. 12 months earlier Sega couldn't even get stocked by several major US retailers and one damn blue hedgehog and a year+ more mature library and all of the sudden Nintendo's complete dominance of the industry is thrown upside down. 

Hiroshi Yamauchi (president of Nintendo) was so angry that the SNES actually had (relative to expectations) a somewhat lukewarm early period of sales in the US that he went to a Japanese newspaper to publically shame and berate his own son-in-law, NOA president Minoru Arakawa, lol. This lit a fire under Arakawa's ass and Nintendo became much more aggressive towards Sega in the 2nd half of the 16-bit gen. 

It is difficult yes. I think Switch and 3DS is a good example of how to do it; I myself criticized Nintendo in 2017 for not pulling the plug on 3DS completely, but if you were a 3DS owner you got a pretty damn smooth transition into the Switch without your current system being abandoned 2 years early.