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burninmylight on 21 May 2024
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zeldaring said:
Soundwave said:

Sony is no longer the plularity of the core gaming demographic, even though the Playstation still sells well and outsells the XBox easily, I think they are the minority of that market.

The PC + Switch + XBox combined is a larger market than the Playstation today (sorry Sony). Beyond that there are also other notable changes, the PS1 + PS2 dominated in Japan as the defacto market leader for game sales there, today Playstation is a shadow of what they used to be, lets face it Nintendo retook Japan. 

The other thing is the hardware reality back then was just different. PC ports of console games was a niche market, there was no Steam store, PC gaming centered largely around Western FPS shooters and strategy games and "console style" gaming was kind of a PC novelty. That's not so today at all. Even like controllers on PC, there was no real agreed upon PC controller standard, today you can just literally use XBox and Playstation and even Switch controllers on your PC. 

Even more to the point in the late 90s/mid 2000s, the Game Boy and DS sure as heck could not run any kind of version of Final Fantasy VII or Final Fantasy X or anything. Today, the Switch 1/2 can plausibly run a lot/all of Square's higher end games. Sure you may have to compromise a couple of things, but it's nothing like trying to figure out how FFX could run on a DS or FF7 on a GBA. 

To say 1997-2006 for example wasn't hugely different from today is just not true at all. 

Now ... is Square-Enix just gonna show up on Switch 2/PC/XBox and start selling gangbusters over night? Probably not. It's going to probably take a little while to build up audiences there because Square has been negligent in fostering their IP on those platforms. But in the long term, I do believe yes absolutely going multiplatform is going to lead to higher sales. It can't get much worse than where they are at now, how in the world does a FF7 Remake (well Rebirth) with lots of GOTY rave reviews, a decent marketing budget, etc. etc. not even sell as well as like a Pikmin game (lol). 

I'm confused where the switch fits into this.  I would say pc,Xbox and Playstation are the same market and switch just does it's own thing with most big games not even showing up on the system. 

It fits in as the " ___ and a Switch" part of your gaming setup because as you said, it mostly does it's own thing. "I game on ___ for big tent games and a Switch for Nintendo games, indies and stuff I want to play while I'm out".

Also, still waiting on those Monster Hunter comparison shots.