I don’t think it makes too much of a difference.
However, there is a correlation between me enjoying consoles more that are also successful, however, it’s not 1:1. I enjoyed Dreamcast and Vita despite them not doing well, and I didn’t play a lot of PS2 or 3 despite them doing fantastically and good, respectively. Another note, 3DS had periods of poor and high success, and I was a big fan during both.

But I don’t think success is the thing that matters to me in how much I enjoy a console so much as how it is used. The PS2 was wildly successful, and I was indifferent toward it, but I probably enjoyed the Gamecube even less - GameCube seemed largely based on what Sony was doing rather than a typical Nintendo console, and I think I was just not that interested in that type of console once I was in University and onward.

Why I loved the Wii so much was more about independence, my social life, and being in my twenties at the time (well, probably also undiagnosed ADHD) rather than Nintendo’s success/pressure levels. Why I like systems with handheld options more when I was in my 30s and now in my 40s, again, social experience and lifestyle. Switch/Switch 2 is basically a Wii and handheld in one. As a note, there was a time when I was getting really into mobile gaming and gaming on my MacBook, but I think that declined heavily because my Switch replaced them (in regards to gaming, I still use MacBook and iPhone for ebooks, music, and internet). So, Switch as a console philosophy is why I like it, where it sold 5 million or 500 billion (assuming Asimov-style human expansion proves true… Arcologies, space colonization and such… although he also predicted the end of surface habitability on Earth due to pollution, and something worse later that I won’t spoil should someone want to read the Robots and Foundation mega-series).

Over the long term, I guess Nintendo's struggles in the GC era gave rise to the Wii which I did like, and likewise their Wii U struggles gave rise to the Switch which is my second favourite system ever. In the near term though, I was less impressed, and found GC and Wii U their weakest consoles.

You don’t get to the kicking ass part unless you have the pressure part. Current and last gen Sony is a perfect model for why you need to be under pressure.

TBH with the number of games releasing, sometime it’s overwhelming owning all systems. It feels great to be confined to a single home console, not even needing to wrestle the thought of “Should I pick up [insert PS/XB exclusive]?”. 

Seeing what's happened to Nintendo the past few years, I definitely prefer when they are under pressure. The success of the Switch has caused them to become anti-consumer.

No HW price drops on the Switch (this is before the AI chip apocalypse and after Switch sales had already been declining for a while and they could have easily greatly discounted the price while still making lots of profit on it to increase the sales).

Very few game discounts. And totally gone are the days of Player's Choice / Nintendo Selects where Nintendo would drop the price of older first party games down to like $20 or whatever. Now Nintendo games just stay full priced forever and the limited time sales are very meager.

Other stuff that goes further back in the Switch gen, stuff like:
- DKC:TF being $50 on WiiU originally and then actually increased to $60 for the Switch port
- SMG ports costing $40 individually at $70 as a pair (for freakin Wii games)
- Mario 3D All-Stars which I love by the way but not having any of the bonuses that Mario All-Stars had which made people upset but for me what made me upset was to include Galaxy but then leave out Galaxy 2 which was a bizarre decision)
- charging for basic resolution/fps upgrades on S2 for S1 games
- not even trying at all on any of the first party sports games on Switch
- allowing Pokemon to become the most disgraceful gaming franchise in the industry with low effort games and the effort seeming to get even lower with each new release despite the fact that Pokemon finally being on powerful systems should have been almost like a second coming out party for the franchise.

Granted Nintendo always makes classic Nintendo-style boneheaded decisions, but it just feels like a lot given that it used to be a decent amount of their boneheaded decisions were HW related (cartridges on N64, GC look like a lunch boy, entirety of the WiiU, etc) and aren't anymore other than I guess the joycon drift issue.


And despite the Switch having 8 years on the market and the successor being a straight upgrade (no need for lots of R&D and figuring how how to make games for a whole new play scheme like in plenty of past Nintendo systems), they still somehow thought it was cool to have a very lackluster launch year and following year as well and could just sell the system based on hype of the last system without a good library.


I would love to see Nintendo do decently bad again for a gen to kick them in the butt so that they actually care about their gamers again and actively do consumer friendly things to convince people to buy.

And in the past NES/SNES hubris led to poor N64 performance / lack of games, poor GC performance led Nintendo to come up with a whole new super fun super popular control scheme, success of Wii led Nintendo to come up with the sh*tshow joke that was the WiiU, utter failure of the WiiU led Nintendo to come up with the Switch. Nintendo makes bad decisions when they succeed.

Yeah tell me about it, Switch 2 alone has more than I can keep up with, before I even factor in other platforms. Better than the opposite though, I still remember those lean years of the Wii U. *Shudders*