"Nintendo users only buy Nintendo games on Nintendo systems" How true was this?

[DonFerrari]

Shtinamin_ said:

DonFerrari said:

I don't think I ever saw a bigger strawman than this.

Ok.
Honestly can you show me a AAA developer nowadays that didn't start out with an "indie-like" sized game? 

I do understand I said, "all" in my statement, and of course there are exceptions, but that doesn't mean we just ignore the indie developers.

Lifetime Sales Predictions 

Switch: 160 million (was 120 million, then 140 million)

PS5: 130 million (was 124 million)

Xbox Series X/S: 54 million (was 60 million, then 57 million)

"The way to accomplish great things, is to be indefatigable and never rest till the thing is accomplished." - Joseph Smith Jr.

The strawman isn't about the "all" (but Sony and Microsoft entering console space and their internal developers didn't start Indie, and the studios they create weren't indie as well, but that is beside the point).

The strawman I'm saying is regard the discussion of why big devs don't support Switch, it is because of the type of game they make isn't really portable in a worth way and for them to make smaller (Indie scope let's say) titles isn't what they are aiming and also the sales they expect on Switch would be much lower than PS/Xbox so for them even if they started as Indie 40 or even 5 years ago it makes no difference.

Mar1217 said:

Chrkeller said:

Indie type games are cheaper to develop and easier to port.  I'm was talking about big budget AAA games.  It doesn't make sense to focus on a console that will offer a small percent of sales.  Just economics.

Ok, so just say it, you wanna move the goalpost because third parties isn't just about  AAA games, even you yourself value them more, this has no bearing on the fact the Switch has enjoyed a success among Indies and AA 3rd party games that it's console competitors do not on the same level. 

As for the AAA perspective, it is partially right in it's own accord that playing most 3rd party games on the Switch is already difficult due to the increasingly old hardware architecture that demands to restructure those games to be available on the platform to begin with. Yet, speaking of % of sales for these AAA games, there's precedent for the Switch versions of these games to surpass easily the Xbox sales, what do we about these ? Do we just say these games should not be ported on Xbox for the same reason you cited for the Switch ?

Xbox gets those games because those are already either being made for PS or PC and porting it to Xbox is quite easy (even if S can give them some extra work or issues) while porting to Switch takes a lot more time, money and even backlash from userbase because they are not satisfied with how the product turned.

And again even if you want to use Indies and A/AA titles to claim Switch have strong support or userbase buy a lot of 3rd party titles when comparing to PS/Xbox you would see average number of SW being 8,6 in Switch and PS4 at 2021 had 13.5 (perhaps it crawled to 15 by now?) and considering the (using most favorable to Switch ratio) 50% and 85% ratios for 3rd party on those systems you would get 4.3 vs 11 SW sold so it really shows that on average a PS owner would buy about 3x more 3rd party titles than Switch owner.

KrspaceT said:

All this talk of sales does make me want to point out we're assume that 3rd parties don't have a responsibility to make products that sell on successful platforms.

If there is a successful platform, shouldn't they be a part of it and figure out how to make it work for them?

Nope. Companies have a responsibility to maximize profit.

It doesn't matter if the platform they release on is big or small, successful or not. What matters to each individual developer is maximum profit, and in the shortest time possible, and that is why most of them go for the option of PS+Xbox+PC userbase and relegate Switch unless they are a smaller company that the scope of their work would run fine on switch so they may launch in everything or when they are so small that even porting to the other systems would take much time (or their market analysis shows that the type of game they want to make wouldn't sell well on those systems) then you may get an organic exclusive to Switch.