Was this gen unwinnable for Xbox?

[Kyuu]

firebush03 said:

Kyuu said:

That's called 3DS erasure. Nintendo never made unpopular portable systems. A hybrid is more appealing than a handheld + a Nintendo home console combined. Switch was the successor to both 3DS and Wii U, which combined sold about 90 million.

And the 3DS generation was an outlier in how bad it was for Nintendo (in the gen before it, Nintendo sold 255~ million consoles). As opposed to Xbox360 being the outlier for Microsoft. A gen where Nintendo fucks up is more successful than a gen where MS does everything right (AND their direct competitor fucks up). There's just no comparison between Xbox and Nintendo.

It’s not “3DS erasure” as much as it is “I don’t believe 3DS is a suitable comparison.” Switch sold with $80 accessories, $60 games, and $300 hardware, whereas 3DS sold for $170 within a year a launch, with $40 games, and would eventually even have models selling for $80 by 2017. Had Nintendo sold 3DS for $300, it would’ve been a flop (as can be seen from sales prior to Fall 2011, and it is by this fact that the prices alone suggest that Switch catered to a different market). It is much more suitable to compare Switch to Wii U, which sold for similar prices and were both markets as offering home console experiences.

Portability is a huge factor for Switch's success. Wii U lacked that, and it lacked Pokemon. The PS5 is also far more expensive than PS4 on both software and hardware, but guess what? It's considered a successor. PS3 was so much more expensive than the PS2, it was a successor. Switch also had a Lite version at $200. The new price trajectory is an industry wide problem not exclusive to Nintendo.

Switch is a successor to both, and would have been a failure without the portable factor. To successfully replace the home console side of things, it needed to be more expensive and powerful than a typical Nintendo handheld. It's a hybrid that replaces both.