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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Nintendo's success with the Switch both a blessing and a curse?

People talking about Nintendo being inconsistent.

NES+Game & Watch-~105 million
SNES+GB (1989-96)-~102 million
N64+GB (1997-03)-~98 million
GC+GBA-~103 million
Wii+DS-~255 million
Wii U+3DS-~90 million

Nintendo has sold between 90-105 million every generation with the exception of Wii/DS which did exceptionally better.



When the herd loses its way, the shepard must kill the bull that leads them astray.

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Alistair said:
SammyGiireal said:

Well they consolidated both their home and portable efforts into one system. Which is an impressive portable and a less impressive console Because Nintendo really intended for it to continue their portable Legacy. The Switch Lite drives that point home. Nintendo really left the strict home console bussiness after the Wii U flop.

Absolutely I agree. The Switch is not a home console, it is a mobile system with a dock. Nintendo did drop out, sadly, and so high sales of the Switch need to be considered vs. the DS and 3DS etc., Nintendo is actually selling less hardware. Here's hoping the Switch success gives Nintendo some confidence to re-enter the home console market. I think they could do a very good job with the new style of hardware that the Switch pioneered.

For example: nVidia and ARM, no optical drive, no hard drive, just 1 or 2 cartridge slots. They could easily release a 7nm GTX 1660 Super based system in 2020 for $250 and I think it would sell really well just like the Wii did (would be faster than the Xbox One X).

What? Hardware sales have shot up since the release of the Switch...

2011 33,532,422
2012 24,454,037
2013 20,249,117
2014 13,898,841
2015 10,860,578
2016 8,749,523
2017 19,867,132
2018 19,980,747

2011 was a perfect storm of 3DS, DS, and Wii.

If you just look at 3DS+Wii (U) numbers the Switch is at about both of those combined:

2011 24,772,747
2012 19,194,206
2013 17,483,183
2014 13,382,872

Switch Sales first 2 years:

2017 13,116,268 (with 3DS still selling 6,625,304)
2018 16,482,594 (with 3DS still selling 3,498153)

And there is still many 3DS users that haven't adopted the Switch yet as their handheld. Technically speaking, Nintendo "won" 2018 by 1,478,127 and Sony outsold them by 922,965 units in 2017 (if only the Wii U wasn't such a disaster...)

Last edited by scottslater - on 12 December 2019

Nintendo with the Switch:

zorg1000 said:
People talking about Nintendo being inconsistent.

NES+Game & Watch-~105 million
SNES+GB (1989-96)-~102 million
N64+GB (1997-03)-~98 million
GC+GBA-~103 million
Wii+DS-~255 million
Wii U+3DS-~90 million

Nintendo has sold between 90-105 million every generation with the exception of Wii/DS which did exceptionally better.

That’s because people don’t understand or prefer to ignore the impact of splitting their own ressources on multiple systems.



scottslater said:
SammyGiireal said:

Well they consolidated both their home and portable efforts into one system. Which is an impressive portable and a less impressive console Because Nintendo really intended for it to continue their portable Legacy. The Switch Lite drives that point home. Nintendo really left the strict home console bussiness after the Wii U flop.

What do you consider "impressive" for a console? Because I can say that I have had more fun with the Switch as a console over as a handheld.  I get what you're saying but to dismiss the appeal of the Switch as a console is very short sighted.  It would take more than one bad console for them to abandon that or else we wouldn't have had the Wii after the GameCube... And as a console I find the Switch lineup better than what Xbox/PS offer right now (Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3, Zelda: BotW, Mario Odyssey, Pokemon Sw/Sh, Smash, Mario Kart, etc.)

Had the Switch been a Home console it would have failed. The Switch is my favorite system because of its portability and most of the market sees it as such. Nintendo left the home console bussiness. 



SammyGiireal said:
scottslater said:

What do you consider "impressive" for a console? Because I can say that I have had more fun with the Switch as a console over as a handheld.  I get what you're saying but to dismiss the appeal of the Switch as a console is very short sighted.  It would take more than one bad console for them to abandon that or else we wouldn't have had the Wii after the GameCube... And as a console I find the Switch lineup better than what Xbox/PS offer right now (Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3, Zelda: BotW, Mario Odyssey, Pokemon Sw/Sh, Smash, Mario Kart, etc.)

Had the Switch been a Home console it would have failed. The Switch is my favorite system because of its portability and most of the market sees it as such. Nintendo left the home console bussiness. 

Except for those of us that play it only as a home console ... I've used it as a portable once while waiting in line on a black friday.  It was too cold to have my hands out of my pockets so even then all I did was watch Hulu on it.



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SammyGiireal said:
scottslater said:

What do you consider "impressive" for a console? Because I can say that I have had more fun with the Switch as a console over as a handheld.  I get what you're saying but to dismiss the appeal of the Switch as a console is very short sighted.  It would take more than one bad console for them to abandon that or else we wouldn't have had the Wii after the GameCube... And as a console I find the Switch lineup better than what Xbox/PS offer right now (Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3, Zelda: BotW, Mario Odyssey, Pokemon Sw/Sh, Smash, Mario Kart, etc.)

Had the Switch been a Home console it would have failed. The Switch is my favorite system because of its portability and most of the market sees it as such. Nintendo left the home console bussiness. 

The same can be said in the opposite direction.

If Switch launched in 2017 as handheld only than it would not be seeing nearly the same success as it is now.

Switch Lite is only selling a fraction of the hybrid model, even in Japan which is very pro handheld. Clearly people value the home console aspect of it.

Switch is in many ways the true successor to Wii than Wii U never was, Joy-Cons being a next-gen version of Wiimotes, emphasis on couch multiplayer, blue ocean stuff like 1 2 Switch, Labo, Ring Fit.



When the herd loses its way, the shepard must kill the bull that leads them astray.

Anything can be "both a blessing and a curse" if you are pessimistic enough.



Well, it is 99.9% of the time used as a home console by everyone I know with one. We bought a Lite to be our “handheld”...



Nintendo with the Switch:

goopy20 said:

After the Wii-U bombed it's amazing that Nintendo was able to come back so hard with the Switch. It probably could have beaten the ps4 this gen if it was launched at the same time as the ps4/Xone. The problem, however, is that next gen is just around the corner. Meaning the specs of the Switch will be even more dated next year and I wonder what kind of impact that will have on its sales and support from 3rd party developers. Nintendo could launch a more powerful next gen Switch, of course, but it will probably take a couple of years before they would be able to get next gen like hardware into a handheld device. 

So what you guys think. Will the Switch still sell like hotcakes when the next gen starts. And if not, should they continue down the path of a handheld device, even though they could only launch it halfway through the ps5/ Scarlett's life cycle?

  

If I were Nintendo, I would launch a Switch Pro in 2021 to extend the life of the current Switch line, and then move on to a backwards-compatible Switch 2/Super Switch halfway through next gen (2023 or 4). 

I honestly feel like developers have to be thinking about making their next round of games highly scale-able with the Switch closing in on 50 million so fast.  



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goopy20 said:

It probably could have beaten the ps4 this gen if it was launched at the same time as the ps4/Xone. The problem, however, is that next gen is just around the corner. Meaning the specs of the Switch will be even more dated next year and I wonder what kind of impact that will have on its sales and support from 3rd party developers. Nintendo could launch a more powerful next gen Switch, of course, but it will probably take a couple of years before they would be able to get next gen like hardware into a handheld device.  

From a hardware feature set perspective, the Switch is doing well, it meets all of the Gen 8 requirements.

Next-gen the buzzword will be "Ray Tracing". - nVidia has not brought Ray Tracing cores to the Tegra line of chips just yet... It's most modern chip is the Volta based Tegra with Xavier.

nVidia's Orin may feature Ray Tracing cores, it may not, still a big unknown. - Otherwise the only real option for Nintendo to meet 9th gen Ray Tracing is with a different chip vendor like Imaginations PowerVR with Ray Tracing, but that can potentially break backwards compatibility with the current software library.

Alistair said:

The Switch uses the CPU core that premiered in the Samsung Galaxy Note 4, 5 years ago, so putting in any modern ARM core next year would get you 3-4x CPU performance in the same power budget

Well... Tegra X1 did come out in 2015.... 4-5 years ago.

If Nintendo leveraged Tegra X2 for Switch we could have had 50% more performance at the same powerlevel on release.

Alistair said:

As for the GPU, sure, they might only be able to double the number of GPU cores (easy enough from 20nm to 7nm) because of thermal limits, but they can do what Apple did with the iPad Pro and give it a 4x memory bus width (Switch uses a minuscule 32-bit bus, while the iPad pro and laptop GTX 1650 / mobile RX 5500 use a 128-bit bus). Combine that with faster memory like LPDDR5 and they could have up to 8x more memory bandwidth. Increase the price by $100 USD and put a current mobile chip in it. We are asking for half the CPU cores and the same memory bandwidth of any modern mobile chip, minus all the modems and neural networks and DSP (i.e. we want 1/4 the silicon of a Snapdragon 865).

The RX 5500 has 224 GB/s memory bandwidth because of GDDR6. The Switch has only 22 GB/s or so because the bus width cuts it by 1/4 and the memory is half the speed of GDDR6 also, so 1/8 to 1/10 overall.

Switch uses a 64-bit memory bus, not a 32-bit one.

Xavier doubles the CUDA count and increases clockspeeds, so it could be a substantial increase over Tegra X1.

DarthMetalliCube said:

Switch didn't get to where it is because of horsepower, so I doubt that'll suddenly become a problem during the start of the next gen.

Performance is all relative though. When compared to other handhelds, it's actually very competent, not class leading, but competent.

When compared to other form factors... Then it falls short.

Either way, my phone obliterates the Switch in terms of hardware capability in every regard, mobile hardware is developing at a rapid pace.

scottslater said:

And as a console I find the Switch lineup better than what Xbox/PS offer right now (Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3, Zelda: BotW, Mario Odyssey, Pokemon Sw/Sh, Smash, Mario Kart, etc.)

Breath of the Wild, Smash Brothers and Mario Kart are on the WiiU, they are also cheaper to buy there... So for those three games, I wouldn't buy the Switch unless mobile gaming is super important.

In saying that... I am having an absolute blast with Links Awakening on Switch, the console is worth buying just for that gameboy remake to be honest.

Still want a Switch TV though that drops all the mobile stuff, then I would sell my current Switch, I just don't take my Switch out of the dock.






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