Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

@BiasedSonyFan
I'm fairly confident that 1-2 Switch wouldn't be selling very well at all if it wasn't a launch game. When you buy a console you buy some games for it. Because what point is a console without games? And a local-multiplayer focused console like the Switch almost demands you owning a game other than Zelda. When it launched 1-2 Switch was one of only three games physically on shelves built for local multiplayer.

Now? It's competing against Mario Kart 8. Next year it'll likely be competing against some other party game. We might get Switch Sports, Mario Party or WarioWare. But on Day 1 it was competing on store shelves with Bomberman and Just Dance.

@BiasedSonyFan
It's not as black and white as you're making it out to be. I'm not saying that people were forced into buying a game they didn't want, I don't think anyone is. I'm saying that it sold well because of factors other than the interest in the game itself. People don't make decisions about buying a particular game in isolation of everything else. They make a decision based on a range of factors.

Did I buy 1-2 Switch personally? No. I brought Snipperclips to scratch that launch day multiplayer itch. I did however buy Graceful Explosion Machine for almost the same reason I think a lot of people got 1-2 Switch. I beat Zelda:BotW and I wanted something else to play on my Switch before Mario Kart 8. And sure Graceful Explosion Machine is a decent game... but I wouldn't have brought it on any other platform. The only reason I got it was because I enjoyed playing games on the Switch and I wanted to play something else on it.

You can argue that people will look at each game for its own merit and buy it or not accordingly. Just like I think you or maybe someone else used to argue that people won't want ports of Wii U games on Switch because if they wanted those games they would get a Wii U. But it's nonsense. There are more factors involved in whether or not someone buys a game than just the game itself. Factors which can make a game more attractive (there's not much else to play) or less attractive (I'm not buying a new console just for this game)

edit:
It's like if you decide that you want to go out and watch a movie on the weekend. And you do it at a time of the year when there aren't that many great movies out. Typically at an average cinema there are maybe 10 movies showing at once. So you go through the list and you pick one from the list that looks like it might be good. You're not being forced to watch that movie and it's not necessarily a bad movie. But if there were better movies out at the time you would have definitely watched something else.

Yeah, some people like to play a lot of games, especially if they get a brand new console. So if you have limited options, good chance that improves your chance to buy a game you might not have otherwise.

And the Switch has been proven the successful strategy of not having a ton of software options. I think 1 2 Switch's quality is only one factor in why it might not have done so well if it was released later tbh. Comparing Excite Truck and Red Steel to their respective sequels is what comes to mind, in which both times a better game sold vastly less (though there were other factors)

A few of those games are getting on for a decade old. They're basically retro games. Plus at least one of the games you cite had no involvement from EA at all (neither as publisher or developer).

In any event I'm not claiming that EA produces nothing of value. There are exceptions and they have some great development talent on the payroll that can and does some great work - no question.

The company as a whole definitely has its own agenda to engineer the industry though and their vision of the industry is incredibly depressing.

Toxic? Dreadful culture? This is a games company that does pretty well for themselves and caters to a wide and global audience. Why would EA choose to 'change course' when they have a winning formula?

Why would they? Because new management often wants to put their own stamp on a company and because the industry (and how you make money in it) is always changing. Perhaps more importantly - with the resources they have at their command and their vault of IP they could be a far more successful and profitable company.

Why should they? It's a company that regularly tops "least popular company" lists - people who love EA's games often do so in spite of the company. They routinely buy successful mid-tier developers and publishers only to shutter them once their first project fails to hit sales targets. They have a toxic internal culture and their impact on the industry is corrosive.

Another factor of why 1/2 Switch sold well was because it had made by Nintendo on the cover. Like @skywake said, my other choices were Bommerman and Just Dance (for the what 9th time). 1/2 Switch was the only new ip and some people wanted to give it a shot over the other 2. Personally we have it but not by choice. It was given as a gift and quite frankly I've played it twice and only a handful of games are fun and it's not worth booting up for those games. I would've never spent 50$ for it and I'm betting a lot of others saw the slightly cheaper price and said why not!

I agree with Spoony Tech on all fronts. It had little marketing compared to other titles. It was not critically acclaimed or positive reviews like the others as well. And yet it was able to succeed. My intake is that it was a hunger for new IP and a party game that sold the game well.

I also agree for what it is that it is not worth (for others. I have made it last long enough to justify how much I spent) what they charge. However $30 would have been the sweet spot for it. I have a feeling it will reach that spot in due time

@StuTwo I originally composed a reply that was beginning to become overly longwinded however, I soon realised that whatever I say probably won't change your mind about EA, given that my examples did little to sway you, whether the games are seven months old (Titanfall 2) or nine years old (Rock Band) so, in this particular scenario, I shall just leave you to your thoughts while the company itself continues to thrive.

I feel indifferent about the company TBH. I do acknowledge that their history of plucking developers when they are a small independent studio that has released a very good game or two has not always turned out to be the best decision for both parties, but sometimes they do okay too.

There are very few publishers who would happily give the go ahead for a Mirror's Edge sequel, for example, which makes me think that there must be some good folks at EA, given that it was a risky investment.

:EDIT: Funnily enough, I evened out all those games by the years they came out - then divided by the number of games - and you get an average of 4.8 years (old), which is hardly what one would consider to be 'retro'. If that's retro to you, then the Wii U is only two months away from being a retro console!

I fully recognise that not everyone will have a similar viewpoint to myself in regards to a company like EA. You probably can't change my mind on them to be honest - only they can do that over long periods of time - but the point of a conversation isn't always to change someone's point of view so I appreciate your efforts to make me think about something differently (even if it's not always going to be successful!).

As to whether EA is thriving - that's a matter of perspective. A strong share price doesn't necessarily mean a healthy company.

:EDIT: Funnily enough, I evened out all those games by the years they came out - then divided by the number of games - and you get an average of 4.8 years (old), which is hardly what one would consider to be 'retro'. If that's retro to you, then the Wii U is only two months away from being a retro console!

Well my tongue was firmly in my cheek when I said they were retro games! For me the cutoff is about 10 years though so a few of the games in your list are almost there (obviously a few are very new!).

@StuTwo Hmmm, did we just conclude a debate in a surprisingly respectable manner?

That isn't supposed to happen on the internet, dontcha know!

@StuTwo Curiously, EA was rated as the best (large) games publisher of 2016 by Metacritic...

(Below: IGN's Game Scoop podcaster's discuss the full list from 1:10ish onwards)

...but I'm with you! The vast majority of their games don't appeal to me whatsoever - and, of the few that do, I often discover something majorly off-putting about it.

Take FIFA for example - if I bought a pack of Pokémon cards in the late 90s and pulled a much-coveted shiny Charizard, that same card still has value today, both as a collectible and in competitive play...in FIFA, if you pulled Lionel Messi in FIFA 16's FUT - that 'card' is useless in FIFA 17 That kind of thing really irritates me - so much so, that I no longer buy FIFA games...

...and if it's not 'anti-consumer' micro-transactions - it's usually something else! A lack of creativity, a franchise being run in to the ground - I could go on!

It would seem, however, that I'm in the minority - their games tend to review well and the sales figures speak for themselves...but they'd need a major (and unlikely) shift in philosophy to pull me back in at this point!

@StuTwo @Peek-a-boo Just two more cents on the whole EA thing, there's a lot of fan hate for EA that is the right amount of hate for all the wrong reasons. EA is a company that, the closer you get to the industry, the uglier they start to become. Once upon a time they were actually a pretty good company with some great creative minds, great devs, great IPs. Near the late 90's into the early 2000's they experienced a lot of management turnover, gaining a lot of former Microsoft management. That was around the point they launched their expedition of buying virtually every studio big or small they had ever done business with and forcing them to become subsidiary in-house divisions or simply shutting them down. They were operating a virtual sweat shop unrivaled until Konami's past 5 years or so....for the people they didn't axe immediately upon extracting their IP from them. They drove themselves into deep debt at that point they're only now just digging out from under, and as a result they hollowed out their creative endeavors and focused on pure revenue generation, leading to the current lack of diverse IP usage, and focus on rehashing a few mass market brands.

EA, the real EA that had great games and lots of creativity, died when Trip Hawkins retired. It was his baby, and he kept it what it was. What Larry Probst, the Chlorox king did in his short reign of terror in that company has STILL not been fully corrected, and it is woven so tightly through that company that it's hard to extract it. He wasn't evil, but he simply was the wrong guy for the job, didn't understand what he was doing, and in a short time ran programs that gutted and binded the company at every level. Bringing Riccitiello in, he gets a lot of flack from fans, and especially Nintendo fans after his "unprecidented partnership" deal,, but honestly he saved the company from itself....BUT he added new complexity in setting a vision for the company that involved converting its whole business model into a revenue scheme, and overestimating digital distribution (and thus having to leverage their power to convert the industry to the new methodology they were using.) Probst was a sales guy. Riccitiello was a distribution and business contracts guy. Neither of them was a content creation/publishing guy, so for almost 15 years the company had been run by people who don't actually understand the core business. Everything else flows from there.

Now we've got Peter Moore, elevated to the position at first temporarily, then voted in. He's one of those former Microsoft guys, and well connected. Two companies with deep in debt gaming divisions and tight relationships leads those two companies to work closely together. He's not really a choice leader, he's just a guy that happened to be there when they needed someone because everyone else capsized the ship, or righted it, but then turned it into a casino ship.

EA needs ACTUAL creative leadership to become what they used to be to gaming. There's a few decent creative people there that weren't randomly fired during Probsts reign of terror, and a vault of excellent IPs. But they're hamstrung by leadership too unfamiliar with how to use it to stray far from the known cash cows.

EA, I think is past the "evil" phase, but they're just kind of "there" producing mass market snack food at ever more manipulative prices, but a lack of deep, quality titles of interest, at a time when the Japanese giants of gaming are rebounding from the blow of the HD era is leaving them reliant of sports games and a small handful of big franchises (NFS, Battlefield.) They went from evil to simply mostly irrelevant, if profitable (or at least paying down the debts of buying dozens of companies for the sole purpose of closing them.)

But they're a fun beating post because their story arc is a representation of everything wrong, and the worst it can get, with most of the big publishers.

Despite its early success, few people have heard of Nintendo's new game console

http://uk.businessinsider.com/what-is-the-nintendo-switch-201...

@SLIGEACH_EIRE I'm going to bring up a point from that. Well, three.

That report used a group that may or may not count as gamers, as many would probably say yes to having played a game, even if its Smartphone, or just at a friends once.

Secondly, is that sample size representative of the entirety of the US Population? Probably not.

Third, yes, PS4 and Xbox One are more in public awareness. I can ID one significant factor: Time.

If you ask how many people have heard of a Switch just two months in, compared to coming up to 4 years of marketing for PS4 and Xbox One, whats the obvious answer?

Plus, marketing is tiered. Once you hit the diehards first, you can filter out marketing to focus on other demographics as the system goes on. Case in point: Why the 3DS is now aimed at primarily young children, females and so on. The PS4 and Xbox One are at a point where their marketing has shifted considerably too. That's not something that happens within two months.

But hey, that's just one perspective. For all we know it could be representative, but my point about the time scale is important, because not everyone sees the moon every night.

@SLIGEACH_EIRE @BLP_Software To add to that, according to the survey, the 2.5 month old Switch is less well known to the (UK) sample group than the 3.5 year old PS4 and XB1, however it's MORE well known than PS4 Pro and Scorpio, the big new flagships from the much more popular companies. And a whopping 18% of the sample group has not heard of any currently produced game system at all? Another odd poll with skewed results based an oddly chosen sample set. I wonder why they didn't include 3DS which is much more relevant when comparing brand awareness rather than selecting individual products of extremely different ages.

@NEStalgia Here's a thing to consider.

Current generation consoles.

So...no Vita. No 3DS. Both 8th generation handhelds.

But Switch is Nintendo's 9th generation console...so...surely shouldn't the sample omit PS4 and Xbox One and...well everything actually. And a console cycle isn't based on how powerful it is by the by, it's by the launch of a new marketing campaign for a new install base under a new brand.

@BiasedSonyFan
Again, I never said people were buying it despite not wanting it. Nobody was saying that. I was saying that the fact it launched when it did made it more appealing than it otherwise would have been. If it had launched later on when those factors were working against rather than for it? The game wouldn't have sold anywhere near as well.

I honestly don't know why you think this is such a crazy thing to say. You spend hundreds of dollars on a game playing machine, you buy some games for it. Inevitably your standards at launch will be lower because of that fact. Publishers have known this for ages, it's something that historically some have gone out of their way to exploit. It's not an unknown thing

Random question again, anyone else using or used these sites that tell you when a store has stock of something? There's like...4 or so of them out there, was wondering if they're accurate. I think one of them is not accurate, since it said a store had 3 Switches in stock, and I just called the store, and nothing.

But yeah if any of them are actually accurate, it would help a lot.

@BLP_Software Very true. My default cynical approach to journalism is to assume the misuse of words and general imprecision (at best) and an agenda (at worst.) Thus in this case my assumption was that when they said "current' generation consoles" what they really meant was "consoles currently (or soon to be) available for sale" and not accurately referring to the actual console generation. But that should include 3DS and Vita, but exclude WiiU which is discontinued. Instead they have consoles from 2 different generations and no handhelds from the same generations, and one console that doesn't actually exist (or even have an an actual known market name yet) compared against a 3.5 year old category leader.

The numbers appear to reflect a confirmation of perception that "the longer a product is marketed the more people become aware of it" more than any other useful information. 3.5 year old marketed products at the time, 4.5 month marketed 2.5 month sold product less known, 7 month old product not marketed very much known less than that, and product that does not have a name or exist yet known less than that. And 18% of people surveyed either don't know what a video game is or think an SNES is current.

@Joeynator3000 I wonder how they claim to gather their inventory information if they don't have access to the inventory system for that company?

Pfft, I dunno how all that stuff works. xD
But if it does work, it would be helpful. lol