| Carl2291 said: Go Switch, go! - Moderated, Rol |
I'm confused.
Bet with bluedawgs: I say Switch will outsell PS4 in 2018, he says PS4 will outsell Switch. He's now permabanned, but the bet will remain in my sig.
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RolStoppable said:
It's not a high target. During the Wii generation, Nintendo sold ~250m consoles. Selling more than Wii and the market not being the same as it was a good ten years ago aren't at odds with each other. |
I see what you're saying now and I still think it's quite lofty. The apparent dissipation of the handheld market is one of the most alarming things I've seen from gen-to-gen, but the aforementioned devices seem to have claimed those victims. From DS to 3DS, the falloff is around 50%, while PSP went from substantial to dead. Aside from the ~65% handheld market shrinkage, the home market sits around 64% with a diminishing X1 and WiiU: the ground to cover this gen is dishearteningly significant.
zorg1000 said:
Wii+DS did 255 million so Switch selling 100 million is a sizeable contraction. On the other hand, 3DS+Wii U will have sold over 85 million when all is said and done and both of those systems heavily flawed conpared to Switch so a 15% increase isnt out of the question. |
I don't know how big the overall market is today and I really wish I knew how to effectivley use the "quote" feature.
| RolStoppable said: It only looks like a tall order if you ignore the self-inflicted damage. What I am talking about are things that are under Nintendo's control. Switch doesn't carry the burden of the 3DS (the stereoscopic 3D feature that fell flat in video games, TVs and cinemas), neither does it carry the burden of the Wii U (the stupid standard controller). Better yet, Switch's hardware doesn't merely avoid being bad hardware like the 3DS and Wii U, Switch's hardware goes beyond neutral perception and actually achieves positive recognition. The basis for high sales is significantly better for Switch than it was for 3DS and Wii U. The same logic should be applied to your home console and handheld market gen over gen comparisons. 3DS - Burdened with 3D. PS4 - No major negatives. That's why the home console market has been in better shape. There's more to it, because the above only covers hardware. A disheartening situation is when you know you did your best and still failed in a big way. But both the 3DS and Wii U were plagued by errors that could be easily rectified, and Nintendo did rectify them. That's why success for Switch is not shocking to me, although I am surprised that the demand is as high as it is. Despite the things holding them back, the 3DS and Wii U combined will finish at ~85m combined. That's why 100m aren't an insurmountable bar for a console that is much better executed. 100m isn't even lofty because it's only slightly better than what 3DS and Wii U did. |
I think the WiiU is much-maligned, despite being a much better system than the revisionist history says it was. The Switch success should not be shocking, because of the WiiU contraction and expected regression to the mean, coupled with Nintendo gearing the system to their market (They've owned the handheld sector for ages.), means that it it was well-positioned to capitalize on their strengths. I love my 3DS, but the Switch is so much better of a handheld option, frankly speaking. My primary concern is overall market contraction and how that would affect and seems to be affecting the 3 major players. It seems far too coincidental to not correlate the rise of smart devices with the fall of gen-to-gen console sales. I refuse to predict doom (partially because this has been my lifetime hobby), but I have to expect market shifts.
Granted, I am not accounting for the impacts of AR/VR and emerging markets: the former innovation and China (alone) could cause a videogame boom.
The Switch is really doing well! It will be very interesting to see how well it will do in the long run, say, after Holiday 2017. Will it slow down then?
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RolStoppable said:
No. |
I won't argue with you on that. It would seem you have a MUCH better sense of these things than I do. When do you expect the NS to hit 100m?
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| RolStoppable said: Smart devices are a factor in the contraction, but they aren't as big of a factor as the vast majority of people believes. Sony's PSP sold in part because of its multimedia features and piracy (emulators), but smart devices absorbed all of that functionality. That hurt the Vita, but what remained is handheld games because buttons on a dedicated handheld vs. touchscreen controls on smart devices is a significant difference for gaming. Vita didn't deliver on games and that's what really did it in. 3D on the 3DS was a lot of self-inflicted damage on Nintendo's part (already covered in my previous post). Where smart devices had an influence on the contraction is non-fictional games. Non-fiction means that there is no unique IP to a game, so no story, characters and world. The DS had Brain Training, cooking guides, sudoko and its variants; all that could be easily replicated and replaced by smart devices. But fictional games like Pokémon aren't threatened by smart devices, so Nintendo hardware remains a necessary purchase. Another big factor in the contraction of Nintendo's business specifically is that both the Wii and DS were phenomena. A phenomenon draws in lots of people who aren't regulars to purchasing video game hardware and software. A phenomenon is incredible popularity. This is probably best explained with the Pokémon series. Red and Blue were a phenomenon; they were so popular that they extended the life of the very dated Game Boy hardware. Sequels could never live up to this level of popularity, that's why Red and Blue sit at ~30m copies sold while the rest of the series has stable sales in the 15-20m range. There were no noteworthy mistakes made with the sequels, but a contraction happened regardless. Similarly, Nintendo more or less had to have a contraction after the Wii and DS (over 250m units of hardware sold in a single generation, that's 50% more than Sony's best), but that alone doesn't explain the drop to ~85m, because a console is more complex than a single game series; new hit IPs can make up for the decline of old IPs. That's where self-inflicted damage comes into play again. During the Wii U and 3DS era, Nintendo wasn't motivated to create as many new IPs as they did during the Wii and DS days. Nintendo wasn't even motivated enough to make a sequel to Wii Sports, or in the broader sense, to continue with motion controls as the Wii U Gamepad wasn't suited for such games. This is the biggest factor in the Wii U's demise, that it never resembled anything close to a better Wii. It wasn't an upgrade. Wii Sports players certainly didn't turn to smart devices for motion control games, because that would make no sense. What happens in a situation where no sufficient new product is provided is that people buy no new consoles and games. This is probably best explained with the Super Mario Bros. series. Super Mario Bros. 1-4 (Super Mario World is SMB4, released in 1990 in Japan) all sold very well (so did Super Mario All-Stars in 1993), but then Nintendo didn't make a new game until 2006 (New Super Mario Bros.). It's things like this that create dormant Nintendo customers; it's not a lack of time or money that leads to no sale for Nintendo, it's the lack of product. Once Nintendo releases a proper product again, analysts and forum goers wonder where all the consumers are coming from all of a sudden. This is what is happening with Switch right now. AR and VR won't make an impact. Switch is what you are looking for when it comes to the next video game boom. This console is only getting started, you've seen nothing yet. |
I think, throughout, you make a very solid case that I largely agree with: my deepest exceptions are bolded. I don't think smart device impacts can be reduced to functionality overlap: there is a capital cost factor. An iPhone costs more than twice as much as a Switch, and that gets refreshed every 6 months. The Wii debuted shortly before the iPhone and right at the incipient stages of the smart device boom. While they pose no encroachment on the Big 3's IP, they put considerable on wallets. When that is compounded by considerable functionality overlap, my concern is only exacerbated. How do these companies compete with a prospective Apple Box that streams all of the same or similar content? Nintendo's move into the mobile space was a brilliant move to make inroads into this progressively blurred territory. Have you ever aligned graphs of smart device sales with those of videogame consoles? The trend is horrfiying (to me). This could lead into a wealth inequality tangent, but you likely know how that also factors in.
With regards to AR/VR? Do you mean they won't have an impact on Switch or the industry? The former is debateable, but the latter is most certainly not. I don't know what your implication was, so I don't want to be presumptuous.
I think Vita would've flopped even with "good games". A regular handheld is not an attractive proposition to a lot of people, you need to go further than that, Vita kinda stuck to the PSP style of portable rather that trying to be something more ambitious.
Portables that try to be small/cheap portable-only devices are not going to do that well in the modern market, it's easy pickings for the mobile market to beat up on.
| RolStoppable said: Not sure why you would think that an Apple Box is something that Nintendo would have to be worried about. The biggest reason why Nintendo hardware sells is Nintendo software and that is going to remain exclusive to Nintendo hardware. The only exception are Nintendo's smartphone games which are essentially marketing that pays for itself. If smart devices were truly set up to gobble up dedicated video game hardware, then NIntendo would have no way to go but down, i.e. Switch would sell less than the 3DS. You've been checking Switch availability for a while now and I don't think you have witnessed a lack of demand nor a lack of spending power as Switch units commonly sell above their RRP. AR and VR won't make an impact on the industry. Various companies are investing into those technologies, but the returns have been far below analysts' expectations. These technologies won't be abandoned right away, but sooner or later everyone will realize that there's no massmarket potential. |
It's not a Nintendo issue; it's an industry issue: they all need to be wary of it, because they all sell boxes. Where current Switch sales are concerned, it's sold out, but we're only talking about ~4-4.5 million units (I think that number is lagging.). That's 2-3% of all to-date current gen sales, so there's a super wide margin for how sales ultimately plane out: who knows what the ultimate capture will be, so early in the lifecycle? I am concerned that, barring disruption they all have no way to go but down. If you're anything like me, the fear of wall-to-wall Candy Crush drivel is real.
If the scion of technology, porn, is any indication of what's to come, VR/AR is a rapidly growing sector. One site alone reported 500,000 daily VR views, and searches have increased by 10,000% over the last 2 years. The PSVR sold over 400,000 units in Q1-2017, and it's in its infancy. Regularly, I have to hear about the popularity of Snap's stupid new garbage headset (from VCs, IBs, analysts, etc.), which is a part of the AR push. I don't know of anyone who agrees that the industry isn't going to explode. The biggest example of it affecting the gaming industry is Pokemon Go, an AR game: it has already impacted the industry, so the genie is already out of the bottle. What remains to be seen is if the market segregation persists and if it does in any significant fashion; hopefully, it isn't profit-driven, derivative nonsense.
PS: I'll be mirroring the last Switch avaialbility poll next week, to see what trends are developing.
zorg1000 said:
131k according to this site if im not mistaken, Wii U never had a week this good outside of the holidays |
Actually only Wii U's 3rd week was stronger than Switch's April week. That means Wii U sold less in any christmas week than Switch in April...
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