If Nintendo waits a long time for a Switch successor, what do you think will happen?

[zorg1000]

curl-6 said:

zorg1000 said:

I’m not sure I believe this theory that PS/XB gamers are willing to upgrade but Nintendo fans aren’t. For example, look at the popularity of the OLED model, you have millions of people willing to upgrade to a more expensive model for a better screen, imagine how many people would upgrade for better graphics/resolution/frame rate.

Switch launch-March 3, 2017

Switch shipments as of Sept 30, 2018-22.86 million (~19 months)

Switch OLED launch-October 8, 2021

Switch OLED shipments as of March 31, 2023-15.02 million (~18 months)

OLED is a more expensive model with a better screen and a couple minor QOL improvements, games don’t perform better on it and it doesn’t have any exclusive games or features yet it’s the most popular sku since it released and is doing pretty well launches aligned compared to the original model.

As long as Switch 2 is a pretty straight forward successor that isn’t way more expensive or focused on some new gimmick that people don’t want (3D screen or Wii U game pad) than I don’t see why cross-gen releases would prevent it from succeeding.

It's not that Nintendo's audience is unwilling to upgrade, it's just that historically they've done so inconsistently.

PS and Xbox have been able to fuck up pretty badly and still sell 87m/50m units, they pretty much just have to show up and say "hey, here's the next box" and people will run out and buy it. 

Nintendo's audience tends to need more convincing.

While true that Nintendo sales are inconsistent, that’s due to major mistakes by Nintendo rather than fans needing convincing. From things like alienating 3rd parties by sticking with cartridges or chasing gimmicks nobody asked for, it’s been specific fuck ups that have hurt them.

As for PS/XB, I don’t agree at all. While there is a pretty consistent total sales for PS+XB consoles, the individual market share has varied widely. It went from 85/15 to 50/50 when Sony fucked up to 70/30 when Microsoft fucked up.

Besides that argument can be made for Nintendo as well, despite making a bunch of foolish decisions last generation, they were still able to sell ~90 million units of hardware between 3DS & Wii U.

As long as Nintendo doesn’t make any huge mistakes that alienate 3rd parties or focus on unwanted gimmicks that jack up the price or have frequent 1st party software droughts than I don’t think cross-gen titles will hurt them.

And I’m not saying all games need to be cross-gen, like let’s say Nintendo releases 8-10 1st party retail titles in it’s first 12 months with 3-4 of them being big made for the ground up exclusives and the other 5-6 being mid-level cross-gen titles and a couple updated Switch 1 ports.