Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

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Nintendo spent the last decade squandering third-party support. 10 long years of driving away third parties for core, gamer-focused games. And that's not going to be fixed overnight. The many failed attempts at bringing 3rd party games to Nintendo platforms to find a bedrock audience since the mid 2000's has finally caught up to us. And it's going to take years, possibly even several generations, before this problem is fully rectified (IF it's ever fully rectified).

There's also the fact, whether people like to acknowledge it or not, that the audience on Nintendo platforms well and truly does have different preferences and tastes in games. I'm not entirely sure a game like Yakuza would sell on Switch, tbh. I look at the Japanese sales numbers for YS VIII, another PlayStation-focused franchise brought over to Switch, and I see 6k sales for week one and 2k sales for week 2. And let's not beat around the bush- that's absolutely embarrassing. We've heard the game is doing much better in the west but we cannot ignore that the Japanese audience is, and will remain to be, their primary focus for most JP style games.

And I worry for Valkyria Chronicles 4, the next major PlayStation-centric franchise coming to Switch. It's reviewed as being just as good if not better than the original, which itself is often cited as one of the best strategy RPG games ever made in the history of video games, certainly of the seventh generation, and it seems like... nobody cares. Just another game nobody pays attention to that gets lost in the shuffle. But games like Valkyria Chronicles 4 NEED to sell well. If Switch is to prove itself as an alternative audience for PlayStation-centric games, then Valkyria Chronicles 4 needs to do well, particularly in Japan. And it's going to take games like that consistently doing well, month after month, year after year, generation after generation, before some of these developers finally come around and change their fundamental beliefs that there is not an audience for their games on Nintendo.

Of course, the same applies to western games. Companies like Ubisoft cannot be blamed for believing that their core games like Far Cry, Assassins Creed, Watch Dogs, Splinter Cell, etc will not sell on a Nintendo platform when they brought half a dozen of them to Wii U, and every single one of them failed spectacularly. And that was a platform where all the core Nintendo fans owned the system. First party games were selling millions of copies, even smaller first party game releases. And yet these mega-high budget games, in some cases, were launching with as little as 10,000 sales, worldwide their first week... let that sink in... let it sink in some more... And it wasn't just Ubisoft's games- it was Batman Arkham, Darksiders, Injustice, Sniper Elite, Call of Duty, Deus Ex, Mass Effect, FIFA, Madden, NBA 2k, etc etc etc. Not a single one of them broke half a million in sales as far as I know, and most of them struggled to even break a quarter million!

That is the core Nintendo fanbase. So yeah, it's no surprise then that big companies are convinced there's not an audience for their games among this fanbase. Sure, there might be multi-console gamers who would be interested, but by virtue of who they are they are already buying their games on other platforms. So they lose absolutely nothing by not bringing their games to Nintendo, because all the people that would actually buy their games are already buying their games, and they don't have to develop a different version to get those sales.

Perhaps there's been a sudden change of heart within the Nintendo fanbase as far as interest in these titles but, I seriously doubt it. A number of fans like to have these titles on their system just because it makes them feel more secure about the platform they own, and they will complain all day long about not having them, but they don't actually have any intention of buying the vast majority of them. They're seen as trophy pieces. Just trophy pieces, to feel as more of an equal in the never ending war of the consoles.

That's not to say there isn't a good, solid, group of about 1 million core fans who are interested, mostly people like us in this forum, the problem is we just aren't in great enough number. The problem is a game comes out and only 25% of us are interested in game A, and a different 25% of us are interested in game B, and a different 25% of us are interested in game C, so at any given time there's really only a quarter million of us willing to buy the next major AAA third-party Western title, plus however many non-core fans and self proclaimed "PS4/X1/PC gamers" there are who happen to own a Switch and want to buy on the platform specifically.

@Fooligan
Huh, interesting.

@NEStalgia
Play YS VIII. Absolutely stellar game. Masterpiece-grade RPG, possibly in the same league as Xenoblade 2 (as much as I'm surprised to say it, because I really wasn't expecting anywhere close to that).