| Farsala said: The point for me is that every console has different situations to contend with, you can't just compare age. Wii for example had incredibly bad legs, perhaps due to Nintendo's desire to kill it. PS4 was affected by Sony's desire to move on. PS5 had a forced great Q4, intentionally overshipped to try and meet their FY target that they missed so badly. This affected the ensuing Q1. I know for me, in my analysis of console hardware and predictions, that I will be looking at "year as major console" and "year(s) before the next major console was revealed" as major factors from now on rather than just "years old". |
I find some of what you're saying to be a bit of a truism. Does every console have different situations to contend with? Of course, that's why some consoles sell very well and other don't. Marketing, economic state, pricing, software, brand recognition, hardware, features, etc. All of these things impact sales, sometimes in less predictable ways. But I don't think diminishing the accomplishment of Switch's 8th year sales is very fair just because it has had different circumstances than the PS4, PS5, Wii, or any other console. I mean, the fact is that the Switch could have not sold this well at all. It overcame it's own hurdles too, from coming off of the lowest selling portable console and home console that Nintendo had released, being significantly less powerful than it's competition and barely more powerful than the Wii U (which, again, was a sales dud and many point to the hardware as a major factor in that), having less features than it's competition, and, let's not forget, chip shortages and the current economic state also affect the Switch.
Also, Nintendo isn't releasing the Switch 2 just yet in part BECAUSE the Switch is selling so well still. I mean, console sales and console life before the successor releases are correlated (it's not 1:1, but it's more often than not that a poorly selling console is replaced quickly). So if you are going to excuse a consoles high sales because of factoring in when it was replaced you are, to some extent, reversing cause and effect.
I don't disagree with you in that I also don't believe sales should be just be looked at in a vacuum, but I also don't think that context takes away from the accomplishment. It's like when people say "The PS2 sold well because it was a cheap DVD player". Yeah, that may have contributed to sales, but, also, what a hell of a good tactic by Sony to get some extra sales and potentially convert people to being gamers. PS4 didn't sell as well as it could have? Well, that's because Sony didn't make the right decisions to give it that extra push. Wii sales fell off a cliff? Maybe they wouldn't have if Nintendo would have pushed more high quality software at the end of it's life or changed their advertising focus to gather more core gamers.
Last edited by Doctor_MG - on 08 August 2024
