RolStoppable said:
Nintendo makes these statements in response to investors who are asking for Nintendo's business outlook. If Nintendo still says "middle of its life" in a year's time, then that means no Switch successor before 2025. You have to remember that this console has yet to receive a price cut or even a big Black Friday deal. It's also making higher profits than any console before it, so Nintendo is in no rush to put out a successor. By now it's clear that Switch can easily go seven years before it needs to be replaced, but I guess what makes people so hesitant to believe in an even longer life is that it would mean that Switch has more longevity than the PS4. But Switch is already well on its way to prove its better longevity. At this point in the lifecycle, the PS4 had received two price cuts and was having huge Black Friday deals. Switch gets by without these things while selling more than the PS4 on top of that. The curious thing is that Nintendo's roadmap lists a Switch successor for the year 20XX, so what does this mean, I wonder. They may attempt to break the traditional console lifecycle altogether when they don't commit to a date in the 2020s. They could do this by launching more powerful hardware that is an extension of the Switch family instead of an actual successor with its own branding and marketing. The original cause for console generations were technological advancements and the need among console manufacturers to be in the same ballpark as their competition to receive the same third party games. But most of the major third party publishers have shafted Nintendo for a long time now, refusing to put their games on Nintendo hardware even when the hardware was capable of running the games. That's why there's no obligation for Nintendo to stick with this old playbook, so they are free to establish a new order. It's much like home consoles and handheld consoles used to be separate devices due to tremendously different technological requirements, but eventually Nintendo asked themselves if the separation must continue when the technological obstacle will cease to exist. The question then becomes if it's still necessary in this time and age to do a hard reset of the installed base every six to seven years. |
Makes sense and could turn out to be true. A hard reset has been necessary in the past, but now it wouldn't really bring much benefit.
