Yeah, the point of my post was to show, that all these comparisons fall short, as obviously customers perceive Switch different to WiiU, Nvidia Shield and a dedicated handheld. That is what sales figures show.

Customers seldomly care about tech in itself. They do care about gaming experiences. True enough, new tech *may* help new experiences, but it doesn't on itself opens these possibilities. For instance: motion tech in Wii was not what made it successful, but it enabled new gaming experiences showcased by Nintendo with games, and that made the Wii successful. That also made the Wii a new gen compared to Gamecube, as GC didn't have the possibility of these experiences.

Therefore new tech is an enabler, but not the driving market force. It is what devs do with that tech. For that reason I think also defining a gen based on tech alone is foolish.

The Switch only came a good three years after the PS4 and XBO. That's not a new generation, the Switch was just a latecomer to the 8th gen. The Wii U flopped, so they had to rush in the next thing prematurely and this is where the confusion comes from.

Ok now your whole point is invalid. They have like 10-15 games in common over 3000 titles.

It's not simply about hardware, but rather about which machines are to be considered relevant rivals and/or counterparts in the ongoing market cycle. This same thing happens in the smartphone market all the time, and PC components function on much the same level. It makes a lot of sense seeing as the console market is more inspired and influenced by both smart devices and PCs today.

My stance is that Switch is neither. It’s a Gen 1 hybrid console that competed with both PS4/XBone, and now PS5 and XSeries. Like the NES vs calculator/keyboard consoles like C64 and Wii vs PS3/X360, it’s an “indirect” competition. By indirect, I mean that it’s capturing market share in a way that isn’t really contested by Sony or Microsoft, at least right now. While there’s a ton of overlap in users, Switch offers a unique experience that makes the extra power of PS5/XSeries irrelevant. “PS5 has X floppies of power and 14,000 zetacoids of blumagons, oxynontenistic splining vaporeel gammaquads” means nothing because Switch offers games that look good enough for most gamers, and they can pick up the experience and go - on top of some really key software experiences like Animal Crossing, Mario Kart, and Breath of the Wild - but also all that stuff that can be played local multiplayer and handheld.

Unified generations have been irrelevant at least 15 years now. You can probably consider PS/Xbox to be other same generation because they released about the same time, and are basically clones. But the reality of the matter is PS5 is the 5th PlayStation gen, the XBox Series is the 4th Xbox gen, and the Switch is Nintendo’s first hybrid console - a combination of their 7th gen home/5th gen handheld console.

What’s relevant is what’s currently competing - directly and indirectly in the dedicated gaming console space. Putting the Switch in the 8th generation or 9th generation is completely meaningless. How could it matter? Saying something like the Switch doesn’t compete with a 9th gen console PS5 because it competed with the 8th gen PS4, or the other way around, isn’t based on reality. I can’t think of any reason to try to shoehorn these generations of different types of consoles together... aside from insanity =)

By the two major parameters that defines a generation, technology and what it was meant to compete with, the Switch is 8th gen.

Yeah for me it has been really amusing because thanks to the reasoning you explained lots of people were quick to categorize switch as 8th gen. But now that switch is on pace to outsell ps4 lots of people shot themselves in the foot because switch being 8th would mean conceding things like ps4 wasn't as dominant as we first thought and that Sony lost 2 gens in a row against Nintendo.

So yeah in next couple of years some guys won't be so eager to say switch is 8th gen or will rely on things like "switch is a handheld" or "Nintendo wasn't really competing in the first place"

https://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread/173316/generation-8-prediction-time-worldwide/

29 November 2013

updated with request:

Consoles have overlapped gens before when starting closer to the end of a console generation than the beginning. The Famicom (NES) released in July 1983, less than 1 year after the ColecoVision which was released in August of 1982. The Famicom/NES has been labeled as 3rd gen, while the Colecovision is considered 2nd gen. This despite the fact that Colecovision and the Atari 5200 were both advertised and described as "3rd Generation/3rd Wave Consoles" at the time of their release in '82.

The Sega Dreamcast was released in November 1998, just 2 years after the Nintendo 64. It was discontinued in April 2001, one year after the release of the PS2. The Dreamcast is still considered a 6th gen system alongside the PS2, even though the 5th gen N64 was still in production and being sold at the time of Dreamcast's discontinuation. Meaning the 5th gen was still active the entirety of the Dreamcast's existence, but the Dreamcast has been assigned as the starter of Gen 6, since the Saturn was Sega's 5th gen console.

So, it's not like this confusing/gray area hasn't existed before when trying to pile different devices from different manufacturers operating on different release schedules.

Another one of these threads

I don't think the answer to this question is as black and white as "The Switch is either in this generation or the other generation" The Switch is likely going to be spending half it's life competing with gen 8 consoles and the other half of it's life competing with gen 9 consoles. If I had to put the Switch anywhere, I'd consider it to be more of a generation 8.5 thing, but to be honest, I'd rather not even put it in a generation at all. The console generation model seems a tad dysfunctional when talking about the Switch.