Sony no longer reporting PS4 shipments, Final Official total 117.00m

[Bofferbrauer2]

bdbdbd said:

padib said:

Of course, the level to which the audiences intersect varies from manufacturer. Like you guys saw, in the West the PS and XB audiences intersect much more fully than PS/XB to Switch. In Japan, Switch and PS intersect much more hence the higher cannibalism.

As yo33331 mentioned, if Nintendo started matching more aggressively the offering of PS/XB, it would lead to more intersect and more cannibalism. However, them seeking each others' audience right now would be over-extension since the manufacturers right now need to consolidate and focus on their strengths in order to succeed, and that's what I see them doing. For example Sony exited handheld and stopped aiming to win Japan, as they were losing amd needed to focus on the West in order to win where it counted most for them (the fight for the Western $$). In the West, a good portion of low to mid-income families may choose only one console for the family and that's where right now the 3 main players battle directly. Nintendo is doing good though all things consideree (WiiU failure, Wii image issues as a non-gamer machine, etc.).

What will be interesting to watch is how one of the manufacturers, once consolidated, will seek the marketshare of the others, once ready, leading to a greater clash of the titans. However MS seems to be making game-changing moves to alter the ability of other manufacturers to gain marketshare, by absorbing key Western IPs and hoarding them into a cloud service, which could eventually be supplied to a competitor like Nintendo, who in turn will want to built such a library in-house. This will get very interesting over the next few gens. If I were Nintendo, I'd be trying to create my own line of software in order to make my own COD or Assassin's creed in-house (like they did with Xenoblade Chronicles in substitute for big JRPGs like FF). Honestly, with all the money they have, how hard can it be over time? Still it will be interesting how things pan out after the consolidation phase we are in is over.

Sony left the handheld market with Vita because of bad sales numbers. It wasn't really what Sony decided to do, it was what the market decided - Sony didn't leave Japan, Japan left Sony. 

Wii U was an attempt from Nintendo to cannibalise the PS3/360 market. Had it worked, Nintendo would have had a good head start to next generation, but it did not - even Vita was more successful than Wii U. 

The thing is, that Nintendo does not see a point in creating yet another system for multiplatform 3rd party games. Not only it makes the system more expensive, but all the software on it would be more expensive to develop. I kind of agree that Switch (and it's successor) could have more games we see on PS4/PS5, but I don't think this is what Nintendo should focus on. The third parties will come when they need to make more money. Either they port existing games or create wholly new ones. 

People left the Vita because of 2 main reasons: It's price (both for the console and the expensive memory cards one needed for the Vita) and the lack of software.

Switch had a Killer App with Breath of the Wild right out the gate, with MK8DX, Splatoon 2, SMO and so on coming quickly afterwards. This meant that there was actually something to play on the Switch, and it's capabilities were quite a bit higher than the ones of the Vita.

Both together contributed to the Switch being seem as a much more viable investment than the Vita ever was. What the Vita absolutely lacked was any Killer App, any game exclusive to the Vita that would sell the system. There ain't anything that could qualify in the slightest for this. Sure, it had many games, even some pretty good PS3/PS4 conversions - but since they already existed there, there was little reason to buy a Vita just for them. Worst part of the Vita was that you basically needed a PS3 to download PS1/PSP games onto the system. Why make it so convoluted??? Sony needed to make some system sellers for the system, and absolutely failed to do so. As such, they pretty much left the Vita to die.

The only type of games that really sold the system were Visual Novels, as there's plenty of them, especially in Japan with tons of Otome there that never made it outside of Japan. But that's not enough to make the system sell in big numbers, and even less so outside of Japan.

So saying that it's not what Sony wanted is pretty much a joke, as they could have done so much for both the Vita and the Japanese market in general, and didn't do anything worthwhile, leading to their declining sales in Japan and the death of the Vita.

Speaking of the Vita, Jim Sterling made an excellent video 8 years ago about the system where he points out at all it's problems and how Sony left it to rot and die instead of doing something that could have saved the console:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUn7Ye8mDXU