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Soundwave said:
Thing is it's not 1999 or 2004 anymore. The majority of the Nintendo buyer base and even the main reason the Mario movie is performing through the roof is the fact that the majority of the buyer base are now *adults* with a high level of disposable income. You don't want to cheap out on the hardware as it will disappoint early adopters. People are willing to pay more for hardware in this day and age and we've seen even from things like the XBox Series S ... people would rather pay more for a PS5 or XBox Series X. Ditto for Switch Lite versus Switch OLED/Base. People *want* to be excited about the hardware they're taking home from the store, not "well it's kind of a piece of crap hardware, but at least it was cheap" ... that's not enticing. Your POV is 15 years out of date IMO. Nintendo is like Marvel now, once upon a time characters like Spider-Man and Captain America were considered "for kids" properties, but today because those IP have huge fan bases that are now grown up, they simply outnumber any single generation of children. |
Most people don't care that much about specs at all, the last time the most powerful console won the generation was the SNES and that was 30 years ago, and people didn't buy the SNES because it was the most powerful, it was because it had the most and best games from both 1st and 3rd party developers that Sega didn't offer as well. Every
Every generation after the SNES, from both consoles and handhelds, the most UNDERPOWERED system won every generation. The PS1 was less powerful than both the N64 & Saturn but outsold them pretty easily cause it offered the most games, PS2 was less powerful than GC and Xbox but outsold them by even more for the same reason, the Wii was the most underpowered but won cause of its cheap price, games, and innovation. And now the Switch is beating both the PS4/Xbox One and even the PS5 and Xbox SX to this day despite being the most underpowered. Same goes for handhelds, the underpowered Gameboy destroyed the Sega game gear, the underpowered DS killed the PSP and 3DS as well killed the Vita. All these examples should be more than enough evidence that people don't really care how powerful the system is as long as the games are there.
We've seen bad price points for a console kill a console WAYY more times than the underpowered specs kill a console, like the PS3,Saturn,Xbox One at launch, and others. To be real the only underpowered device we saw flop was the Wii U, but nearly literally every other mainstream underpowered console has sold very well, showing that people much rather care about the price of a console than how underpowered it is.
You used the example that, "people are buying the more expensive Xbox Series X more than the S which shows that people would rather pay more for an expensive experience." but there are problems with that argument as I'll list below:
1.That is just one example of a more powerful console outselling the weaker console VS the 10+ other examples I listed where the underpowered console easily beat its more powerful counterparts
2.The main reason why people are choosing the Xbox SX is because it has a disc drive, and many gamers to this day still want the option to have physical media as proven by the physical/digital game sales distribution, where a large 60% of game sales for the major consoles are still from physical games, so many gamers would want to pay more for physical media.
3.If that were the case that people would rather pay more for more powerful iterations/consoles, than why didn't we see the Xbox One X or PS4 Pro outsell the regular PS4 and Xbox Ones in any week outside of launch? The answer is that people would rather pay less to play the same games and most people don't care enough for specs to upgrade.
