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curl-6 on 13 March 2021
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Shadow1980 said:
curl-6 said:

Exactly, which was another prediction I came across a lot in 2017-2019. Cos why would anyone buy a system less powerful than a base Xbox One when they could buy a super duper 4K next gen powerhouse instead? Heck, before launch people said the same thing about PS4 Pro and Xbox One X killing the Switch at birth by being so far ahead of it in power.

How easily people forget history; that the DS became the second highest selling system ever while selling alongside the PS3 and 360, or that the PS2 became the highest selling system ever while selling alongside two more powerful competitors.

I remember people saying something like that. It was an argument I've never got, because the release of a system from one brand has never impacted sales of another, older system from a different brand. The Switch had no effect on PS4 & XBO sales, and it stood to reason that the PS5 & XBS will have no impact on Switch sales. Well, so far, so good, considering the Switch is still doing very well. It's no different from how, for example, the release of the 360 did nothing to hurt PS2 sales. Now, when a new-gen system in one brand is released, it tends to cause the post-peak decline in sales of its predecessor to decline, but that's something different entirely as that system is intended to replace another. The only system that will impact the Switch's sales will be its successor.

Now, when you have two or more competing consoles that offer very similar experiences, there is a fight over market share within a specific generation. That's been a fight between PlayStation & Xbox for four generations now. Outside of their exclusives, they offer nearly identical experiences, and therefore compete over market share. While it's not a complete zero-sum contest and there is some overlap, with some people (like myself) owning both PS and Xbox systems, most people that buy one will not buy the other. The market for those "conventional" consoles is around 160-170M units per generation globally (65-70M in the U.S., 60-65M in Europe, 9-10M in Japan).

But Nintendo has been offering substantially different experiences, and thus isn't necessarily competing over market share with Sony & MS. They do their own thing and fill their own niche in the market. There appears to be a substantially greater percentage of people who own a Nintendo system and either a PS or Xbox (or sometimes both) than the percentage of PS owners who own an Xbox or vice versa. For example, there was an NPD survey published in Jan. 2020 indicating that 40% of Switch owners in the U.S. owned a PS4 or XBO. Meanwhile, what little data I could find on PS-Xbox overlap indicates that at most maybe 10-15% of PS owners in the U.S. own an Xbox or vice versa.

Pretty much yeah, it's different enough that it coexists more than directly competes.

The graphics argument in particular never made much sense given the long history of systems outselling graphically superior options. I get that people thought low power would equal no third party support, but even that isn't necessarily the case, see the DS and 3DS for example. Heck, even the Wii had better third party support than people give it credit for.