Topic: Help me understand your certainty around the recent Switch 2 leaks :)

@skywake many, many people in their late 20s and 30s have young kids. I'm not sure why you think that my statement about young families being the largest audience doesn't hold up to scrutiny or the data but all you have to look at is Nintendo's marketing to see that this is the case - and they absolutely have the data.

@gcunit apologies if I assumed something about you that doesn't hold up to reality. I agree with yours and Skywake's assumption that the new system will have more power - I don't see how if couldn't. I do disagree that Nintendo will be happy to take a hit on sales this generation however, sure it might be a high bar to surmount, but I 100% believe they will at least try to get there.

I'm also going to add here this bit given there's a bit of a "I know you are but what am I" but RE: you're only seeing what you want. What I want to see from Switch 2 has not been confirmed. Some is highly likely and implied. Some seems less likely now. Some we don't know

If you had asked me a year ago what I wanted to see? I would've said a smaller device. One with a HDR but probably still 720p screen. High refresh rate and VRR. I would've said a scroll wheel and analogue triggers would be great. These things are either not confirmed yet, seem increasingly unlikely or outright go against what we've seen/heard

The only things I wanted to see that we are seeing are:

• More performance (8 years on, you'd hope so)
• A hybrid design (winning formula, again not a shock)
• Backwards compatibility (continuity)

@skywake I apologise if any of my comments came across as "I know you are but what am I" - as I've mentioned several times, I'm not trying to argue with anyone here - I'm trying to identify where my biases lie and whether the community can help me identify any blind spots that might be leading me to make the wrong conclusions. I thank you for your input on this front, although I still remain unconvinced that the leaks are real if I'm honest, since the items that I've raised that lead me to question the legitimacy of the leaks still feel valid, even after input from several members of the Nintendolife community. It's a work in progress however, maybe tomorrow something will click into place and I'll end up agreeing wholeheartedly with you all.

Look at the original trailer for the Switch. Yes, they market to families. They market to everyone. But who did they market to put of the gate? People in share houses, people travelling, Nintendo Karen and her rooftop party. That's the core audience

This was the launch trailer, so I agree that this was the intended target audience (at least in 2017). 7-8 years later however, Nintendo will have collected a lot of data regarding their audiences and will amend their marketing accordingly. If you watch more recent trailers they are much more family focused.

Also you're only deceiving yourself by trying to argue that because people in their 20s and 30s can have kids that the bulk of people owning the console being in their 20s and 30s is proof it's for families. Which age bracket isn't kids and families if that's your argument!

Not proof on it's own, this is a bit of a strawman argument as I'm suggesting the marketing is our clearest indication of the demographics for the system, not that people in 20s and 30s == parents. I'm simply suggesting that people in their 20s and 30s can be (and often are) parents, as a rebuttal to your suggestion that I have read the data incorrectly.

My direct experience is that the large majority of Switch owners that I know fit into the young family bracket, and I only know one or two people in my age bracket (25-40) who own a Switch for personal use - I also know far, far more in this bracket who own PlayStation's or Xbox's. Obviously I am just one person so this data point may be an anomaly compared to the worldwide audience, but this is why I look to Nintendo's marketing team as they absolutely have the data regarding who their main userbase is and how their users interact with the Switch, and will tweak their marketing and future plans accordingly.

@KingdomTears @skywake Of course the demographic shifts over time. Early buyers of consoles are typically people with more disposable income, hence the early switch advertising. Nowadays the buyers are more likely to be families and kids. It's going to shift again when they do a console launch, because their target demographic for year 1 console sales is different than the one for year 7 console sales.

@link3710 fair point

The Furukawa comments are definitely something to think about looking forward, but even before the leaks I suspected this next device would resemble the current Switch on the surface with some unique features to set it apart. I thought of the current Switch like a console that also happens to be a handheld for the longest time, but I think many people (including Nintendo to an extent) view it as a handheld that also happens to be a console.
If it follows the console progression, we could easily see something as different as the Wii was from the GameCube, but if it follows the handheld progression (as I personally think it will), it would make sense to get something that looks like the Switch we currently have. Though the DS, DSi, 3DS, and New3DS technically have significant differences if you look closely at their features, any random person who knows at least a little bit about video games could recognize any one of them as a DS.

@KidSparta mostly agree, although the 3DS has some clear differences in form factor to the DS/DSi, such as an additional analogue stick and a set of buttons under the bottom screen, while the designs we are seeing from the "leaks" are very, very similar to the current Switch with just a single additional button under the home menu that even a Switch owner might fail to notice is new. I do believe that Nintendo would want to at least make some obvious aesthetic differences to set this new system apart, even if it's still clear that the new console is part of the Switch family of systems.

Kind of off the main topic, but I do wonder how they get their demographics data. Most of the people I know with a Switch got it so they could play games with their kids. So they do play games themselves but fundamentally they bought it for their family. And none of them bother using the child-account setup so the recorded ages would be of the parents who made the account, not the children.

Fundamentally, Nintendo is famous for being family friendly and having fun family games and all-ages games. It's not their only audience, but it's a major one.

As an interesting data point, something like 70% of people in their 30s have kids and at least in the US, recent surveys showed 76% of parents played video games with their children. I'm guessing most of that 24% of parents who don't play video games with their children simply don't play video games, so probably the vast majority of 'play games on Switch and have children' means the children also play. Based on that, children seem under-represented on the demographics chart. Unless Switch owners are very specifically skewed towards childless people. I'm guessing Nintendo simply doesn't have access to all the child playing data; I'm not really sure how they even would.

The graph is specifically of Switch owners. I'd think that children would tend not to own their own Switch but use one that's owned by their parents instead.

If they do, it's probably not the only one in the household either.

@Matt_Barber @FishyS
Fairly sure that graph would be based on accounts given it would be far easier to track. People literally give them that data. And you can have multiple accounts on a system. Is it possible a parent shares their kids account and puts their age on it? Sure. But I would imagine if they're doing that then they got the console for themselves

Also it's worth noting that the western world is largely an ageing population. There are less kids than there are older generations because people are having less kids. And additionally the millennial co-hort is often described as the "echo boom" given they were the children of the baby boomers. So the above chart shouldn't surprise

Anecdotally I would note that I only got a Gameboy when I was around 8. Then I moved onto being more into music and largely ignored gaming through my teens. I didn't have a GBA or a GC. Before then coming back when I was around 20 with the DS and Wii. I don't think that's a particularly unusual trajectory and, looking at that chart, it seems to be one reflected in the data

In any case, the pedantry is a bit meaningless. You only need to look at the advertising Nintendo puts out to see that kids are not their primary focus. And this will be especially true for early adopters of the Switch 2 as it was for Switch at launch. Parents will be buying Switch Lite for their kids in the same way they picked up 2DS through 2017

@skywake I don't think the information for local accounts would be shared and, in any case, it's only Nintendo accounts - for eShop and NSO access - that they'd have the DoB for.

Children are a lot less likely to have linked accounts, so there's probably some under-reporting in terms of overall usage.

I find this topic really interesting. Most companies (especially technology companies) have teams of Data Scientists who analyse the large amounts of data being transmitted by products connected to the internet. This data is very often imperfect due to issues like the ones you have mentioned (people don't always use Products in the ways that the company intended or hoped), and so there are couple of things companies do to mitigate the issues:

First, they put useful tools in place for certain situations that help track this data - in the case of Nintendo an obvious example is the parental controls app which was released at Switch launch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03bAayBtcb0)

Second the data scientist teams clean and wrangle the data by inferring things from the way things are utilised. For the Switch this would be things like; what controller configurations are being used?; Is the console in docked, handheld, or tabletable mode?; how many players are using the system?; Is the console connected to the usual IP address? This data helps paint a picture of how and who is using the system - if the console is connected to a home IP, often being used in tabletop mode with several players using single joycon controllers, then they can probably infer that the household is one with a family.

This is a tough challenge for Data Scientists but the data is extremely valuable for ensuring future success through understanding what makes your product successful or unsuccessful. There's a saying in the community that states "garbage in, garbage out" meaning if the original data isn't captured effectively, it will be extremely hard to infer realistic information about your products.

What I would LOVE to know is how Nintendo captured information about the Wii U to understand that the feature that most people enjoyed about the console was being able to use the gamepad screen away from the TV with the convenience that brought to modern life - I don't recall Nintendo touting this feature at all during the Wii U's lifespan, and yet it became one of the defining factors in the design for the Switch. I do believe without this observation being made the Switch would have probably never existed.

User surveys and device telemetry (edit: also IIRC whether or not a game supported "off TV Play" was a very common question on MiiVerse. And I remember on more than one occasion games being updated specifically to add it based on MiiVerse feedback. So it was always known to be a popular use case)

Interesting note about the second point. We know a LOT about what Nintendo was thinking and doing through that period and all the way up until a bit after the Switch launch. It didn't actually pan out in the way that you're theorising here. Their primary goal almost immediately after the Wii U launched was to streamline development between portable and home console divisions. Presumably as a reaction to the increased development costs moving to HD. This isn't a fun reason but it's still a very good one

Their original plan was actually going to be a portable Wii U. Literally. A miniaturized and underclocked Wii U you could take with you. They also had some ideas about casting the screen to the TV wirelessly (thank god they didn't). But then NVidia showed the Tegra X1 to them and suggested they could make something portable more capable than the Wii U. And by then the Wii U was flailing so..... that's how we got the Switch. So fundamentally it was more about development efficiency and technology more than anything else