| Turkish said: Not a difficult prediction to make. No one's actually expecting the Xbone to reach Xbox 360 sales, 360 is the best supported MS platform ever and it barely made it past the PSP. Xbox is losing the market share it captured from PS last gen. Nintendos hardware business is dwindling, the 3DS has peaked, mobiles changed the handheld industry forever, the next Nintendo handheld will likely have trouble reaching even the 3DS sales. Same story with their home consoles. Nintendo consoles sold less each gen since the NES if the Wii is left out. |
I am not attacking the person who made this quote because even as a huge Nintendo fan I had to acknowledge the apparent truth of this trend back in 2015. I am sure if you dig through my posts in 2015 you will find multiple posts acknowledging that I would be really happy if the NX (Switch) could reach 40 million (most people were predicting that it would bomb worse than the Wii U). That said, I just wanted to draw attention to this viewpoint because it was absolutely prevailing back in 2015 and is the main reason that this thread was made. There are two aspects of this view here that I am glad to say have both been proven woefully wrong:
1) NES-SNES-N64-GCN-Wii U forms the prevailing trend of Nintendo's home console market. Back in 2015, the Wii was seen as a lucky fluke that Nintendo could not recreate. Nintendo's gimmick failed badly on the Wii U and demonstrated that Nintendo was no Apple in terms of innovation and was not able to recreate their own success. All that this left us with was the consistent downward trend that we saw from Nintendo's other home consoles which led people to believe that Nintendo's home console market business was finished. The fusion concept was discussed even on this board as the only route that Nintendo had to stay relevant in the home console market which is what Nintendo ended up doing with the Switch, but I cannot emphasize how unclear it was that this strategy would be successful in 2015 much less result in a console that massively exceeded the sales of Wii U + 3DS as the Switch is doing. I just don't think that many people believed that Nintendo would be capable of producing a cool, sleek handheld that can have fast enough hardware to hold its own as a home console. Most people in 2015 were expecting another big clunky Wii U gamepad if Nintendo tried something like this.
2) The unstoppable momentum of smartphones gaming destroying dedicated handhelds. In 2015, nobody including myself ever thought that the smartphone gaming fad might be something that would result in something similar to the gaming crash of the 1980's. In 2015, it was a near consensus that Nintendo needed to move into the smartphone gaming ASAP. We were all oblivious to the growing amount of microtransactions and garbage, low-quality games that were slowly flooding the smartphone gaming market that was creating the same conditions that Nintendo prospered in back in the 1980's.
I think that the second prediction was the biggest mistake that we all made back in 2015. Honestly, the Switch could easily be a dedicated handheld and it would probably be just about as successful as it is today. Nintendo completely turned the smartphone gaming boom on its head and swept the floor with it and used the industry's own lack of quality control against it. I still do believe that there is some truth to the first prediction and Nintendo's inability to go up against Sony and MS with dedicated home consoles, but Nintendo has become so radically successful with the Switch that the dedicated handheld market is basically now eating into the home console market and that is what is happening this generation.
