Would You Consider Nintendo Switch The Most Commercially Successful Gaming Hardware Of All Time?

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Kyuu said:

curl-6 said:

The competition Switch faced in the portable space was the fact that pretty much everyone has a phone/tablet with an endless array of very cheap/free to play software available.

Convincing people to buy a portable console is a much harder task in the post-smartphone era, as we saw when the market collapsed from over 230 DS/PSPs in the 7th gen to less than 90 million 3DS/Vitas in the 8th.

Mobile phones aren't yet replacing consoles. In general, they appeal to a very different crowd and play different games. Nintendo has dominated dedicated handhelds since the GameBoy. It's a huge selling point and I don't understand why some people pretend that it isn't.

Doubling as a handheld is a big and real Switch advantage regardless of mobile phones domination. It adds more than it subtracts.

A huge part of the handheld market, especially with say DS, was simple pick-up-and-play games; phones now provide this for very cheap or even free, which represents enormous competition for any portable machine trying to win people's limited time and money.

Look at the sales of pretty much any other handheld device released since Switch; they've all sold tiny numbers, cos the market for a dedicatd handheld has largely dried up. 

It's not that Switch faced little competition, it in fact face very intense competition from both mobile gaming on the portable front and PS4/5 on the console front, it was fighting a war on two fronts against very powerful and entrenched enemies.