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Soundwave on 01 March 2021
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Pyro as Bill said:
Soundwave said:

.."gradual decline not huge mistakes after massive successes like Pyro said"..

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.

- Is it still a failure if it takes MS out of the game?

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.

 - Fortnite and PUBG are available alongside Mario and Pokemon but no-one ever claims it'll result in Sony/MS/PC casuals moving to smartphones.

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.

- Who cares about 'top selling'? It just shows how gullible the hardcore are to marketing. Ring Fit and Switch Sports will sell 20M+ like their unbundled predecessors did. Mario Party on Switch has outsold Mario Party and Wii Party on Wii and DS. Since when were Pokemon, Animal Crossing, SMB and Mario Kart not czualz games?

...

If the metric you want to use is that having in some cases 20-30 year old franchises like Mario Kart, Pokemon, SMB, etc. make a game system "casual", then every Nintendo system is casual and there's nothing that special about the Wii or DS. The N64 birthed Mario Party, had Pokemon games, Mario games, and Mario Kart too, guess it's a casual console too. 

If game streaming for example wipes out most of the traditional big box home console (Playstation/XBox) business but Sony survives with 60 million PS4s and MS is wiped out with only 15 million XBoxes or something ... sure I would deem that a massive disappointment for both of those companies. 

If Nintendo had made a third DS that was along the lines of a Vita in hardware spec and focused on being a small portable game machine that couldn't run their big home console games like BOTW, I do think that system would have struggled to sell more than even the 3DS. If you want to survive in the world of smartphone gaming, you need to have a system that can offer console like experiences, not compromised watered down bespoke portable games that were the norm on the Game Boy-DS-PSP-Vita brands. That type of system would get eaten alive today. Now the Switch can of course have smaller scale games (even the PS4-PS5 have hundreds if not thousands of smaller titles), but that is not the only type of game the library can subsist on in gaming landscape of today. You need to have the appeal of a "real" big ticket Mario Kart, Mario 3D, Zelda, Splatoon, etc. to be the tip of the spear to demonstrate you have a product that is legitimately different from portables of the past. 

Maybe people should just treat Switch like its own thing. It's not beholden to any specific legacy. There's never been a device that could plausibly function as a reasonable home console and portable both, there's never been a portable device with 3rd generation tier 3D graphics where there a fair level of refinement in polygonal graphics so that artists can still create fairly high end looking games even on that baseline. There's never been a mobile chip in a mainstream game system that could handle many of modern home console engines (Unreal Engine 4, Unity, etc.). Nintendo's never had a portable that could their main line console lineage ... BOTW for example is the successor to Twilight Princes and Ocarina of Time, it's not some scaled down Spirit Tracks of Link Between Worlds game done by a B-team. 

There are many factors like the natural evolution of technology that opened the door to this. If it was somehow possible to make a compact portable hybrid N64 circa 1997 or a portable GameCube in 2003 for a reasonable price, maybe Nintendo sells 100+ million of those too, that simply wasn't possible to do at that time. 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 01 March 2021