| RolStoppable said: "Dark ages of Nintendomination" is a statement that is plain stupid. If you look at the sales of individual Switch third party games, the vast majority of them are either flat or up in comparison to their respective predecessor. Then there's this graph which shows a clear upwards trend in response to growing investment in Switch game development by third parties: None of the third parties that are supporting Switch are hurting. Their finances have seen a positive development or at the very least they've avoided sinking with the PS ship. Part of the decline in overall third party software sales is due to this being a physical-only chart, but another important factor is that the overall number of game releases has decreased due to higher development costs, and as a result, publishers have focused more on proven IPs for the fewer games they make. |
That's a very good point that I've missed. The number of games released are decreasing, and sales are decreasing as well
To say this is not a dark age though, it's overlook the data, Switch is barely recovering the market lost by 3DS and still far from recover tonthe point they were when there was more systems in the market. You may just say you don't care for situation of third parties, but they never presented themselves in worse state than they are currently, at least since PS1 days
You are missing a point of how Playstation absence is detrimental for third parties. Playstation first party is irrelevant in Japan, all customers locked on Playstation ecosystem therefore buy, overwhelmingly, third party games. This alone push Third party sales towards bigger peaks on PlayStation platforms compared to Nintendo's. Switch is the pretty much the second most successful console of all time in Japan and has yet to beat third party sales of only mildly successful consoles likes Vita and PS4
The growth of Switch ecosystem, while increase third party sales, will also reflect on Nintendo's first party output, the growth in userbase is shared because, unlike Sony, Nintendo first party output is truly competitive and just keep getting stronger as result of Switch's success
An workaround for this is, of course, go multiplat, release on PCs and invest in localization to USA and Europe. If those third parties look for Switch as their only way to recover they following the path to shrink and becoming les relevant. Barely flat sales generation to generation when development costs rises is at best an orange flag, they will need to find other way to increase their revenue which, of course, includes keep supporting Playstation and expecting their recover, or, at least, keep their fandom outside their home market
Last edited by IcaroRibeiro - on 28 April 2022
