Topic: The Best Value in Gaming: Nintendo Switch 2

Looking at the current and future landscapes, console value is going to come down to which one can a household afford? Out of all the options Nintendo presents the lower entry price, widest array of games and brand power with families is the highest. Nintendo is now more than ever the console maker with the greatest chance to have multiple systems in a household. Why buy 1 Steam Deck, PS5 or XBOX Series X when you can essentially get two Switch 2’s for near the same price? Much easier proposition especially when there are multiple children in a household.

@Rainz

I'm a Steam Deck owner and when Valve last had an offer in the UK of a 256GB LCD Steam Deck for £279 I bought mine second-hand for £230 including a high speed Samsung 512GB card. I valued the Steam Deck at £200 and the card at £30 but lets face it the Steam Deck is out of the race now not that the amount it sold was every high volume. Other PC handheld options are cheaper or more capable or both. At one point £300-350 was a viable price to get a second-hand Steam Deck OLED in the UK but its probably £500 plus now. I love my Steam Deck and if you have one its a great gaming option but if you are considering buying one unless you can get a great price second-hand I'd probably recommend you didn't bother. I guess the original Switch remains the Switch 2's greatest competitor but not new second-hand. Nintendo has pushed up the price of the Switch 1 at retail but on the second-hand market I still see great deals and that is where Switch 1s are selling far more. A good android tablet can also be a good portable gaming option and you can add a joypad enclosure to it to make it a decent option for android games and emulators.

It seems both Microsoft and Sony are coming back round to having exclusive games again and for me that is the number 1 reason to have a Switch 2 because of exclusive Switch 2 games. I can't get my head around why Microsoft and Sony ever believed exclusive games are not important to a console.

@BonzoBanana
It's not too hard to see their thinking from a certain angle: If you put your games on more platforms, you'll sell more copies of your games.

But yea, then the question becomes: Great... so if I can just play that game on my PC or other console, why should I keep buying your consoles? Maybe Sony and MS thought their existing customer bases were invested enough in their ecosystems to not want to leave regardless?

And then you dovetail that with live service games really hitting their stride in the last decade, and the formula was simply: Get game to as many people as possible, rake in that sweet microtransaction money, prep the next live service game, repeat.

In my mind, that was the foundation of the thinking - I really think most publishers were seeing a future of mostly Fifa, Minecraft, and Fortnite playable on pretty much anything, so Sony and MS were just trying to be amenable to that reality: become ubiquitous, essentially.

And then the Switch came along and spanked them, they had a few live service game flops, etc. Now maybe we're course correcting.

I suspect in additional factor they didn't reckon with is. . . sure, a huge chunk of the market's revenue is live service. However, this doesn't guarantee that their own fully owned live service games will be that market revenue. Most of the time its not, because being giant console companies doesn't actually give them a magic edge in the market. The net result is lots of live service revenue. . . going to someone else, even on their own platform. Instead of diminishing the need for console ecosystems, it made them all the more necessary, because they can't get any cut of the Fortnite pie without a console on which you sell Fortnite and take the retail cut.