Part of the attraction in selling a bundle of VC games, whether in mini's, eShop or on cartridges, must be the fact that only a handful of people ever buy more than 2 or 3 VC games. I love old Nintendo games and I'm sure I'm an outlier (we all are on this forum) but there are more games on the SNES mini than SNES VC games that I bought on my Wii and Wii U.
I think the long term goal must be to offer a Netflix like arrangement though. It's the only way that less re-releases of less commercially attractive can possibly be viable.
I've seen more than 10 Switch systems in stores in the last few days. I also nabbed a Guardian amiibo restock. I am a little concerned that the Switches didn't sell out. I wonder if the enthusiasm is settling down.
Who knows? Maybe. But you'll drive yourself insane worrying about something like that. It's anecdotal; only Nintendo knows how things are going.
I also think it's really easy to keep losing sight of the forest for the trees: they launched this thing in MARCH and did incredibly well. March. Not exactly a hotbed of activity in the gaming world, usually. In fact, the summer is usually pretty quiet for games, too. It's amazing how well the system has sold and the attention it's received in such an off period, especially for families and other more casual consumers that do most of their shopping during Fall/Holiday.
The devil's advocate is that OF COURSE it's generated attention: it's the only new system on the market!
I'm assuming there is a marketing strategy in place. Nintendo probably has limited stock right now, and could easily sell it all at once. However, we're not seeing a sudden drop-off of sales because Nintendo is rationing out stock over the next year, to make sure people are still looking for it and not forgetting about it. It's just gonna look really low for a while and gradually pick back up. That's my theory, anyway.
I'm holding off any doomed declarations until the holiday season. I'm hoping they'll have a ton of stock by then. I feel the holiday is make or break for the system.
@Grumblevolcano The quote you posted from Q9 to me indicates the opposite. If they're looking to make it as big as they can, that implies they want to seek all avenues to make it available. The Mini makes it available to retro-only gamers that aren't buying current, expensive Nintendo consoles for current experiences, but that doesn't indicate they don't ALSO want to sell it to current console owners. I think the $5.99 for a 20 year old game model is done, but I'd bet "NES Classics Vol 1 (Switch)" For $39.99 could be a thing. Or a streaming service (Nintendo Online: $19.99, Nintendo Super Online: $39.99/mo with full retro catalog rental, etc. I'm sure they have something in mind beyond the classic mini's to make Switch a viable destination for retro seekers, not just one-off sales.
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I'm holding off any doomed declarations until the holiday season. I'm hoping they'll have a ton of stock by then. I feel the holiday is make or break for the system.
I'm holding off any doomed declarations until the holiday season. I'm hoping they'll have a ton of stock by then. I feel the holiday is make or break for the system.
Unless Nintendo utterly fails in keeping up a consistent stream of games in the following years, I don't think there's really any chance the system could fail. Not only is it a console and a portable, it has Breath of the Wild, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and ARMS, and will be getting Splatoon 2, Mario Odyssey, Mario + Rabbids, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Fire Emblem, Fire Emblem Warriors, Kirby, Yoshi, Metroid Prime 4, Pokemon, and presumably Animal Crossing, Smash, and a localized version of Monster Hunter. I just see no feasible way it could fail with that lineup, not to mention all the other games that are coming that we don't know about.
@rallydefault You missed the sig on that post: "Sent from my WiiU"
Nah, WiiU was "if they manage to sell enough this holiday it's make or break for the system"
With Switch it's "OMG, I hope any stock is available for the holiday, they're all gonna be gone on black friday and up to $900 on EBay!"
No, seriously, Nintendo does have an incredible system in the Switch AND the games on it and in the future are already incredible.
But in the modern gaming industry, that really means nothing. You can be the PS4 and launch with nothing except Netflix and a twin-stick PSPlus game and "win" the generation almost instantly, or you can be something like the Gamecube and have a starting lineup including a well-received "Mario" game and still "fail."
In the social media age, it's more about the perception of the company than it ever has been in the past. When Microsoft came out and royally botched the Xbox One reveal, they pretty much handed this generation to Sony. When Sony, especially, followed up with those hilarious game-sharing short video poking fun at Microsoft, I think more gamers bought into the PS4 regardless of the underwhelming launch lineup (that pretty much lasted a year). And where does Nintendo fit in? Well, at that time, still just for kids. MAYBE that's breaking up a bit now, though.
@NEStalgia
AH! Holy cow, I didn't see that! LOL! That's perfect.
@KirbyTheVampire I agree except from the part about localized Monster Hunter but that's probably been discussed a bit too much in this thread, the MHXX thread, the MHW thread and comments section of articles to do with Capcom.
@rallydefault That is true. PlayStation is definitely a strong brand, and a lot of people see it as THE gaming system in a sense. I still feel like Nintendo has a good chance this time around though, both due to the larger amount of "hardcore" games on the system than there were on the Wii U, and the fact that it's a portable.
I think the portability especially is what's ultimately going to carry the system to success. There just isn't much demand for pure Nintendo consoles anymore. Those have been on a steady decline if you exclude the Wii, which was, to use an overused expression, lightning in a bottle IMO. Nintendo's strength is definitely in portable gaming. That really makes me wonder if they'll keep the hybrid concept or not. They better have a strong gimmick for the next system if it doesn't turn out to be portable like the Switch, because their consoles don't really perform well at all.
@KirbyTheVampire
I agree with pretty much everything you said, although...
I have a crazy theory.
I think that Microsoft will exit the console space IF the Xbox One X does terribly. Big IF, obviously. I say this because their CEO is all about NEW experiences that their competitors aren't already doing. Examples: their all-but exit from the phone competition (I still have a Windows phone - they are awesome, in my opinion), augmented reality as opposed to straight-up VR, and their line up of Surface tablets that have really distinguished themselves from iPads and other tablets.
Basically, I really don't see the company wanting to hang in an iterative console market if they end up taking losses on the X. I mean, Xbox One is already maimed this generation in the sense of the "race" - it's selling very poorly compared to PS4, and both sides have always made it very clear they do consider one another direct competitors. Also, it's been very clear lately that nearly every Xbox One "exclusive" ALSO comes to the Windows platform in general, meaning exiting the console space doesn't necessarily mean an end to the games. Windows is still top-dog in the computing space.
IF Microsoft would pull out, I can see Nintendo having a slew of options in front of them for their next home console, if they would want to do one. Maybe they do a powerful competitor against Sony just like the good ol' days? Maybe they continue with "gimmicks." Who knows? Will be interesting.
@rallydefault "The social media age" really is the only thing in that post that matters most of all. That's the thing. Particularly for the age groups and social segments interested in gaming, overall, "follow the herd" is the ONLY thing that matters for ALL things. Nobody wants to be different or left out, everybody wants to be part of the herd. It goes beyond video games, but it does target the game consumer even more broadly than most. That's a bad thing not just in gaming but in society at large....
Though MS really DID amazingly screw up their entire brand in less than 20 minutes. I was fence sitting that E3 on which direction to go and even I was easily swayed to preorder PS4 after that video But "not going digital" is one of my big 3 criterion for console selection so it was a no brainer that day. PS4 had no games but reiterated physical media as a priority. XBox couldn't shut up about football and Call of Doggy. I figured not knowing about games had to be better than the games I DID know about that was XBox's ace in the hole
Switch does, so far, seem to be breaking that deathgrip though, mostly by targeting the modern mobile lifestyle. A "tablet" may not be awesome to "gamers" but a "VCR" isn't really awesome to the mass market. Tablets are
@kirbyTheVampire For Nintendo it's been kind of their own creation though. Yes, the kinds of games they make don't demand home theater systems, and thus fell out of favor as a console, but they've also split their focus since the 80's on two platforms, and, really, since the Wii/DS era, most of their "hardcore" games have been on handheld and NOT on console. If those games had been on console instead, and there had been no handheld, maybe the numbers would be different. They never really moved into the "games as movies" idea with Sony (which in hindsight, Sony's a movie and music company foremost, so it all makes sense.) Everyone forgets Wii was an exercise fad more than a console early on. The later life sales reflect it's position as a console better than the early sales. They seem to now understand this. Their REAL strength has been handheld/portable since the 90's. Even in the SNES era. Add in the modern era where MOST gaming is done mobile and only a specific market plays on a TV, Switch just makes sense, both for Nintendo, and for the market at large. It's one of those "why didn't anyone do this 10 years ago?" kind of things. Actually Vita tried, and then was mismanaged horribly.
@rallydefault I don't know how well a powerful console would work for them. Nintendo doesn't really tend to make games that are all that ambitious. Maybe that's partly just a side effect of the hardware they've been working with, but I don't really see them making very many games like Horizon or The Witcher even if they did have the hardware for it. They have been delving into that more and more lately though, with the biggest example being Zelda, so who knows.
The numbers might have been pretty different, yeah. Like I said in the post above though, I'm not sure Nintendo really makes games that justify the power and price of a cutting-edge console, not to mention the lack of portability. People who are fans of consoles and PCs tend to be looking for super impressive and ambitious stuff, unfortunately, and Nintendo doesn't really provide that to the same extent Sony does. (Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. I love Nintendo games. It's just not what console fans tend to want)
I can only imagine how well the Switch would have done back then, especially in the pre-smartphone/tablet era. I don't think the tech was there, though, unfortunately.
@KirbyTheVampire@rallydefault The real thing with "consoles looking for super impressive" isn't really ambition. BotW is far more ambitious than anything that's been put out by Ubi and EA for the last decade (excluding BG&E2 but that's YEARS away, and is post-BotW inspiration.) PC gamers, by and large are just tech junkies. They don't care about the game, they just want a tech demo to impress them with how amazing technology is. I know, I was one for long enough....
Console gamers, today, are looking for ambitious scale and visual effects. Well, BoTW has the scale down, but not the visuals. The trouble (or fate I suppose) is simply the merging of "gaming" and "home theater" into being part of the same "audio-visual spectacular" concept now. Sony started it (via using games to push their media formats) but now it's cemented that a "home console" is more like a Blu-ray player, it's there to give you an a-v sensory treat and push technology. It's not really that Nintendo drifted from the console market, so much as the console market drifted away from the gaming market and toward the HT market, while Nintendo (and Sega) stayed with gaming. The bad news is that means Nintendo type games don't suit the modern thinking of "consoles", while Nintendo-type fans (and old-skool PC fans who still play old-skool games on PC, not the graphics fests), don't really suit the modern thinking of consoles either. It's almost as though consoles have become an entirely separate market, different from the market that old consoles used to be. Fortunately handhelds (and Nintendo in general) stuck with "games as games", and serve the market for that (to a degree, so does mobile), and Switch really seems to be (as it should be) the glue that binds "games as games" thinking with the now frayed customer base looking for that across portable and home.
IMO, a game like Rabbids + Mario, and XC2 is massively more ambitious, in terms of the game, than Witcher and Horizon that's mostly a game that marries conventional play-it-safe and easy-to-understand gameplay in a big pretty world. I'm still looking forward to playing Horizon, it's in my pile still, but I know I'm getting kind of a snack-food experience out of that, while the others provide deep gameplay you have to really critically think. But that's not a typical HT extravaganza, while games like Horizon would lose most of their wow played on a 6" SCREEN.
Looking at what Switch is doing, the actual interaction is more like what games were in the 8/16 bit days. You PLAYED the game. Looking at that "big" experience on other consoles, it's a mix of cinema and interaction where the game kind of plays you. Both can be fun, which is why I own both, but I think the moniker of "interactive entertainment" fits the "modern" console, more than "games" does. Kind of a reversal.
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