Will the Switch 2 have some secret sauce? If so, what?

[Shadow1980]

zorg1000 said:

It seems like you’re assuming Vita did poorly because it was a straight forward successor and that seems like a very poor conclusion. A big part of PSP’s appeal was that it was pretty much the first all-in-one portable multimedia device, you could play games, watch movies, listen to music and surf the web. That was a really big deal in 2005. Fast forward to 2012 and everybody has a smartphone and/or tablet that does all of those things, it’s no longer a selling point.

On top of that, many of the top selling games on PSP like Grand Theft Auto, Monster Hunter, Gran Turismo, Metal Gear, God of War, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, etc did not get new additions of Vita.

If a bunch of other wildly popular hybrid devices release before Switch 2 and it doesn’t get Zelda, Mario Kart, Pokemon, Smash Bros, Animal Crossing, etc then yeah it will probably bomb.

We have seen with NES to SNES, GB to GBA, PS1 to PS2, PS2/XB to PS3/360 to PS4/XB1 to PS5/XSX that more powerful devices with QoL improvements can do very well. Devices that have a big drop off from their predecessors do so because of specific reasons, not because they were straight forward successors.

Yeah. Systems fail for various reasons, but not being risky or innovative enough isn't one of them. You can't get any more conservative than PlayStation, which has been the dominant brand in home console gaming for most of the past 26 years since the PS1 blew up, yet their consoles have been for the most part just "better graphics boxes" for five consecutive generations.

The SNES lost market share because it had actual competition. It still won its generation, both globally and in the U.S. & Japan (the Genesis won in Europe IIRC), so not a failure, but not the dominating force the NES was.

The N64 saw further drops and lost to the the PS1 by a massive three-to-one margin worldwide because most third parties massively reduced support for Nintendo in light of Nintendo sticking with cartridges (CDs were far cheaper and had far more storage capacity, making them nearly 100 times more affordable on a cost per MB basis). Nintendo was unable to recover from this with the GameCube, and they stopped making conventional consoles after that, with the Wii being low-powered, affordable, focused on motion controls, and appealing to a wider demographic.

The Saturn lost to both the PS1 and N64 due to numerous mistakes, from a terrible software lineup (including no mainline Sonic game) to the $400 launch price, which was a lot to ask for in 1995 (most expensive system ever from a major console maker, adjusted for inflation). Despite having a good amount of success with the Genesis, Sega lost sight of what made them successful as they went into the mid 90s. The Sega CD and especially the 32x was the first warnings that they were going off course, but the Saturn was a disaster, one they never recovered from. The damage to their console brand was irreversible, and they stopped making consoles after one final attempt with the Dreamcast.

The PS3 saw Sony's market share drop significantly thanks mainly to its own massive launch price of $500 for the cheapest SKU (only slightly less than the Saturn, adjusted for inflation). It wasn't a failure per se, and it did beat the 360 in Europe and Japan (and likely worldwide, if only barely, despite the 360 far outselling in the U.S.), but it was a massive drop in sales from the PS2.

The Wii U failed largely due to a significant software drought in its early life, and perhaps more importantly terrible marketing/messaging. It seems commonly agreed upon that they failed to differentiate the system from the Wii, giving the impression that it was just a tablet accessory for the Wii. Nintendo tacitly admitted that in the advertisements they had in the 2013 holiday season, where they made it a point to state that it was an entirely new system. Having the system revolve entirely around an expensive gamepad that can't be bought separately probably didn't help things, either.

The Xbox One failed to replicate the success of the 360, allowing PlayStation to retake its dominant position, because MS made numerous mistakes ahead of the system's launch, including forced bundling of Kinect, excessive focus on its multimedia aspects rather than the games, and most notably its widely-publicized plans to restrict used games on the system and require the system be always online to function. While they pulled back on the always-online requirement and the used games policy ahead of launch and they released a Kinect-less SKU a few months after launch, the damage had already been done.

So, it seems that charging too much for a system, taking risks that don't pay off, and not having the games a system needs are the most common reasons systems lose market share or fail outright.

Nintendo playing it safe with the Switch 2 would not be a cause for concern. As long as it has a reasonable price tag, a solid games lineup during its first few months, and marketing that does a good job of selling the idea of a next-gen Switch to people, it should do fine. As I said yesterday, there's a good argument to be made that Nintendo has innovated and taken big risks largely out of necessity, not just for the hell of it. Those risks have had inconsistent payoffs. If the Switch 2 is something radically different from the Switch and it doesn't pay off, Nintendo would be in a very bad spot as they only have a single unified platform and therefore nothing else to fall back on. The Switch 2 being just a more powerful Switch is the safest route, one that's most likely to guarantee another system that sells well over 100M units.

Last edited by Shadow1980 - on 08 August 2023