| IcaroRibeiro said: I agree People saying it would sell less than Wii U confuses me If the system have the same capabilities as Xbox it would likely get the same third party support as Xbox, which means it would get the third party player crowd Many of the games and system sellers on Switch would end on Wii U instead |
There is faulty reasoning here, namely the assumption that more power leads to more third party support. Yet the comparison WiiU and Switch alone disprove it. WiiU was much, much closer to contemporary consoles than Switch is, yet it got barely any 3rd-party, while Switch has massively better 3rd-party support, actually the best of all consoles. Switch may have fewer games than Steam and maybe Android, but it got much more than the other consoles. For instance in 2023 over 14K games released on Steam, but among the consoles Switch lead with 2600 games, above PS5s 1300 and Xboxs 900. So again, power is unimportant.
https://gameworldobserver.com/2024/01/12/steam-vs-consoles-catalog-3x-more-new-games-in-2023
This is true for the past as well, Gamecube and Xbox were both much more powerful than Ps2, yet the weak PS2 got the strongest 3rd-party support.
As I argued before, more power probably would've lead to even fewer games, as Nintendo would've struggled to make them. More power means higher expectations from gamers and that leads to balooning budgets, as all these objects, polygons and textures have to be created. Also a more powerful WiiU might have been more expensive.
This is why the AAA-industry currently is in a full on crash (did you see the massive layoffs). AAA games aren't sustainable anymore and I think we will see a stop or a strong slowdown in graphic showcases, as creating these games simply gets too expensive. Also both Sony and MS will go more and more 3rd-party as they have to recoup game budgets. They both have already started, this will get faster. Interestingly, by staying behind in power scale Nintendo has avoided these problems for the most part and still has manageable budgets for their games.
So yeah, anyone claiming WiiU would sell better in that scenario confuses me, as there is really no indication that would've happened. Nintendo consoles wouldn't have magically secured the 3rd-party support the company lost the generations before.
