Why are Nintendo Switch sales peaking much later than other Nintendo consoles?

[Soundwave]

Pyro as Bill said:

IcaroRibeiro said:

Ninty 64, probably their biggest failure as console maker, it was their defeat on read ocean market and ultimately opened a market for Sony become a stronghold on home console market they preserved til today

After N64 Nintendo needed to revise their strategy every generation because they can't be sucessful anymore competing in the same market space with Sony as proved with Game Cube. When Nintendo hardware and games are attractive besides Sony they succeeds (Wii, Switch), when not they bomb (Game Cube, Wii U). I'm general I see Nintendo position on home console market as much more complex than both Microsoft and Sony and their sales floating so much between generations shows that

Switch in other hand is correcting this problem consolidating Nintendo into a new hybrid business model. On handheld market Nintendo was always absolute, so as long they keep releasing hybrids I'm sure they will not ever have a flop like GC or Wii U again 

Soundwave said:

I mean they went from 95% marketshare with the NES/Famicom down to like 60% with the SNES and then eventually into a total tail spin ending up around 11% by the time the GameCube ended its run ... that's a pretty whopping drop.

The 3DS selling only half of the DS is still a pretty large dud, the XBox One is going to sell about half the XBox 360 ... you see any XBox fanboys really cheering that as a big success? If the PS5 sells only 65 million units, about half of what the PS4 should finish around, you can bet your ass a lot of people were term that a big disappointment. PS5 needs to sell a minimum of 90 million units I would say and a even flat 90 would be a bit of a disappointment. 

Losing 80+ million customers from one cycle to another is never a good thing, especially when the 3DS required a massive panic price cut that led Nintendo to lose a lot of money. Almost every time Nintendo's had a huge success (NES, Wii, Game Boy, DS) the successor has sold notably less, in some cases disastrously less, the GBA being probably the sole exception there though since it had its lifecycle cut short prematurely it's not as well remembered.  

So sure that's probably where that reputation of having doubts about Nintendo's ability to transition success from one generation to another comes from. You can claim its unfair, but you can't really control other people's opinions. If you're someone who claims loudly they're never late, but you're actually late half the time, you can't really sit there and throw a fit when people maybe make a joke about your punctuality. 

Or if a hockey player scores 100 points one season, and then only 50 the next season or a basketball player goes from averaging 25 points per game to only 13 points per game, people are going to ask what's up with the drop, even if 50 points or 13 ppg is still OK for a lot of players. If the iPhone starts to sell half of what it used to sell, that would be a big story. That's just how the world works. 

SNES dropped ~20% from NES then N64 and GC dropped another ~33% each. It's a gradual, continued decline due to Nintendo following the conventional 'more graphics/bigger games' philosophy. None of them are 'huge mistakes after massive successes'.

Whatever measure you use for 3DS, it does infinitely better than the PSV and the PSV's successor. Had Nintendo put out a lower end system like DS then it might have left a bigger opening for PSV given the conventional thinking was that smartphones will swallow up the handheld cazualz like they did with Wii.

Nintendo went to great lengths to explain in detail what their strategy was for Wii and DS and why they expected it to be successful and copied. Putting it down to luck/a fluke/lightening in a bottle alongside NES, GB and Switch is ridiculous.

Take it up with people who have the viewpoint then, there's a lot of them, I'm just telling you why some people view it that way. A "gradual" decline doesn't really change the fact that it was a steep drop overall. The fact that it was multiple generations worth of mistakes that took them from 95% market share to 11% looks probably just as bad because it indicates they kept making a litany of errors each successive generation. 

Losing 50% of your customer base is never really going to be considered a "win", if the PS5 loses half the PS4 market base, people will call it a disappointment, some will call it a failure. 

Smartphones do dominate the casual market by a monstrous amount at that, Switch is successful precisely because it offers experiences deeper/bigger/more console like than the smartphone and got away from the sinking DS/3DS format of being too small scale of an experience. If Nintendo tried to release a Switch with more casual type experiences as the main killer apps and lower specs they would be in a lot of trouble right now. 

The top 10 selling Switch games are very different from the Wii or DS, the Wii's top 10 was dominated by stuff like Wii Sports, Wii Play, Wii Fit, that is not the case for the Switch. Ring Fit is a nice hit buoyed by the fact that gyms are closed or a no-go for hundreds of millions of people right now, but it's not going to be one of the 5 best selling Switch games like Wii Fit was for Wii, not even close. 1,2 Switch is not going to be anywhere close to the top 15 Switch sellers the way a Wii Play was, or Nintendogs for DS. All the IP that are selling are long established Nintendo IP like Mario, Mario Kart, Zelda, Animal Crossing, Pokemon, the difference is those are "big brother console" versions of those IP and not the tiny weeny portable versions but because of advances can be played portably too. That puts the experience on a different level from other systems including Nintendo's own past handhelds. 

Your Game Boy circa 1996 sure as heck wasn't going to play Super Mario 64. The 3DS wouldn't be able to run anything close to Breath of the Wild or even Splatoon would be a large problem (paint physics). It's just a matter of technology being available now that was impossible in the past and third gen 3D ages better than 1st or 2nd gen 3D. To not recognize as playing a role in the Switch's success is also naive. Once you get into the range of about a PS3.5, you get a level of visual fidelity that allows for satisfying versions of genres like open world games, shooters, action games, and console quality 3D platformers that simply were too compromised in the past, even on Vita. A Vita would have to make massive sacrifices to run a game like Breath of the Wild or DOOM Eternal or NBA 2K or Witcher 3 or Mario Kart 8 or Skyrim or Splatoon or Dragon Quest XI or even Mario Odyssey ... 3DS ... forget it. 

The Switch is the first portable 3D console which runs popular modern genre games and you don't feel always like the game/genre has to be completely compromised. 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 27 February 2021