JohnGrey

@FelixSandwichez

I have no idea why she gets the hate she gets, did people even play the story?

Because in the pantheon of North American voice actors doing rubbish British accents in popular media, she is only narrowly edged out by Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. It was gratingly atrocious and broke my immersion every time she voice a line.

And if you broaden that to include Irish accents, yes, that includes Christopher Walken in Wild Mountain Thyme.

Oh my god, why? Why isn't this a real thing? I play this game every year like clockwork and I would gladly shell out full price, even $70 or $80, for this.

I own five of the eight.

@Nico07 I'm very glad you enjoy it, mate. There's enough misery out there without begrudging people the right to determine that they find fun or not. There are plenty of them that don't click with me, but it's a rare few that make me actively dislike them. Skyward Sword is on that list, so I was just giving my own opinion on the game.

Even if they had brought it up to 1080p and re-textured everything to erase the abysmal water-colour visuals, I still wouldn't buy this abomination. It's the Dead Space: Extraction of the series and I was perfectly fine keeping it on equally dead consoles. This is being done in the hope of redeeming Aonuma's fragile ego about people not liking his puzzles and half-baked mechanics.

It's sad that I have to preface by saying that I don't support or condone harassment of any sort, but that's unfortunately the world we live in.

Having said that, her performance was atrocious. As a Brit, it could not have been more apparent that she was a affecting an accent, and poorly at that. A rare American/Canadian can pull it off, usually one with a British parent, but most absolutely cannot. It was worse than Lindsay Lohan's accent in Parent Trap, though not nearly so bad as Christopher Walken's Irish 'accent' in Wild Mountain Thyme. Whatever the case, I'm glad she isn't letting it bother her.

@milvus976578 Oh, I'm sure that's the case. Microsoft desperately wants to make inroads into the Japanese market and having one of the greatest RPG devs in business today would be an enormous boon. It would also mean that any subsequent Persona releases would be guaranteed release on PC, which suits me just fine. That said, Nintendo would actually make something of the IP, whereas Microsoft has a storied history, though not so storied as EA, of intellectual vampirism.

It's time for Atlus, Sonic Team, and other subsidiaries from Sega to join the house that Mario built. A fevered dream of mine is a Sonic Adventure-style game with the typical polish of Nintendo.

Faeces: ignore the taste and smell, and you've got the cheapest sandwich filling around.

Why is this not being compared by attach rate? Raw numbers can be interesting but it needs to be weighed against the install base at the time of release.

Porting Super Mario 3D World to the Switch is, or at least should be, a foregone conclusion given the utter avalanche of first-party Wii U titles that have come across, not the least of which is Captain Toad, which relies on many of the same mechanic and proved that the touch functionality can be translated. Is it assured by the Best Buy listing? Of course not, but it makes far more sense than a listing for a Wii game for a console that has not had a single Wii game, or a listing for a mainline Persona title when there hasn't been one on non-Sony hardware for more than two decades. I do hope it comes over, though. It was a fantastic game, and if TMS deserves a second chance at life then Super Mario 3D World certainly does.

I'd rather see Nightdive finish the System Shock remake I backed almost five years ago.

@Kalmaro

1.) Shims
2.) Shuriken for zombie apocalypse
3.) Visible reminder of the inexorable passage of time and inescapable obsolescence of everything including yourself

That's just off the top of my head. My main confusion as a drinks coaster is that it's totally non-absorbent and it doesn't seem like condensation would pool effectively.

I'm puzzled by the use of floppy disk as drinks coasters.

The purpose of this whole survey nonsense seems clear to me. Now that P5R is out now, sales of vanilla P5 will slow significantly if not stop outright as most people will opt for more content despite the higher price. Presently, ATLUS knows that they either can't port because it will upset their strongest partner or because they're legally enjoined by an exclusivity agreement that hasn't been publicly disclosed.

So ATLUS puts out this survey and says to Sony, 'Look, there is so much demand here for Persona on Switch. You have P5R as an exclusive on your system and probably most of P5S sales will be on your consoles. We want another turn at the trough with vanilla P5 on Switch; if you'll allow that, we'll give you a cut of the profit and expand the franchise. If you won't, we'll abide by that but we've carved out a strong audience on Nintendo during the 3DS era and that's carried over to Switch, which has shown strong growth worldwide. We'll have to revisit the matter of platform exclusivity for Persona 6 when we see how the Playstation 5 sales perform'.

Yes, there are rumblings that Sony may be opening up their grip on exclusivity with the rumors of HZD on PC but I'm still very dubious about Sony allowing its primary competitor at home and abroad to establish a beachhead on its most beloved and critically-acclaimed RPGs.

@mesome713

I would argue that it's not a slight against Sony at all. As has been observed, Sony doesn't own the Persona IP, it likely just has exclusivity for the existing Persona games. So, Atlus is free to license the characters for whatever purpose. Let us concoct a purely hypothetical scenario.

Atlus knows that there is some Persona appeal on the Nintendo platforms, just based on Persona Q and Q2, the latter of which has already featured Joker and the other members of the P5 cast. Atlus also knows that it can't outright port mainline Persona to Switch without angering Sony, especially when Sony stands to profit nothing and lose a major platform exclusive should it appear on Switch. They have to have someone to gauge IP interest on the platform in something other than a weird dungeon crawler. What do you do? Make a Persona game that is just different enough (action combat instead of TBS) and release it on the Switch. If it flops, you don't bother to bring the series to Switch; if it succeeds, you have leverage to tell Sony that there's a rapidly growing install base that provides an alternative revenue stream, so it's in Sony's best interest to negotiate a timed exclusive arrangement in exchange for a cut of the Switch profits.

Obviously, there's a load of supposition on my part, but it makes sense to me from a business perspective.

@Bdawg1226 Obviously, I mean exclusivity for the P5 game alone, as that's the one that being constantly port-begged. I'm well aware that they make games for the Switch, and did so for the 3DS. That's why I said that they wouldn't cross Sony to 'sell an aging game on a platform with half the install base'.

@GameOtaku @Bdawg1226

Bdawg's right, the supreme virtue in Japanese culture is loyalty. Loyalty to the state is why Japan has a 99.98% criminal conviction rate and even if you're acquitted or released because of exculpatory information they continue to try to prove that you're the culprit because to do otherwise would mean admitting that the state is wrong. Loyalty is why samurai would commit suicide after the death of their feudal lord.

Atlus and Sony have done very well by each other and have a relationship in Persona that spans nearly a quarter-century. Sony's PS4 has an install base of 106 million consoles and I see nothing to suggest that PS5 won't enjoy similar success. Even if we assume that Atlus and Sony have no formal exclusivity deal, which I consider unlikely, Atlus is not willing to cross a business relationship of that duration and magnitude to sell an aging game on a platform with half the install base. The last time Sony was crossed in that fashion, coincidentally by Nintendo, they introduced the PlayStation and decimated Nintendo's market share and third party support.

Yes, Atlus might, and probably would, do very well on Switch, but they can't afford to make an enemy of Sony. If they manage to garner strong sales on Switch with P5S, that gives them leverage to go to Sony and argue for a timed exclusive for Persona 6, but that's as far they're willing to go at this point.

@Ventilator Agreed. They'll never top Nathan Fillion as Nate and Stephen Lang as Sully. The only change I would have made to the fan film would be to cast Anna Torv as Elena.

@Einherjar

You could well be right, but I won't editorialise on whether Playtonic displayed any arrogance insofar as their development is concerned. As for the JonTron controversy, I respect Playtonic's right to determine whether any constituent of their developed product is in line with their artistic and personal principles and to remove it if they so choose; I'm equally supportive of the right of consumers to display indignation over the choice of that removal and to go so far as to boycott the product and encourage others to do the same.

I think the best answer for what happened on this production actually comes from the making-of documentary for Conker's Bad Fur Day that appeared on Rare Replay. Chris Seavor said something to the effect that they could never remake that game, or make another like it, because who they are as developers and artists is totally different compared to who they were at the time. The intimation was that, phrased as the statement that their tastes had 'changed', they considered themselves above such crass, puerile work. I don't think that attitude is so very different from what Rare had in making NnB. You just have to look at games like Super Mario Odyssey and A Hat In Time to know that making a 3D platforming collectathon that's brilliant is certainly possible but not without the passion to put it in the crucible of what the industry has learnt about game design in the intervening twenty years and making it better. Y-L refused to do that.

@Einherjar That's precisely my thoughts on Y-L. It was a middling platformer that had all of the problems of excess that B-T had without any consistent type or degree of theming, like how the snow kingdom and marsh fit the storybook theme but the remainder, especially the casino, do not. And then to take combat elements like the jump flip and twirl from something as poorly received by the fanbase as NnB was especially strange to me.

@Darkhound1999

I do understand why people would be upset at the lack of difficulty, but at least there's a decent reason why.

Having a 'decent reason' for why Odyssey had a laughable difficulty curve (that it's even a curve is debatable) making it better is like saying that I should feel better about being a victim of an armed robbery because the person that robbed me needed my money for family member's surgery instead of a crippling substance abuse habit. Can you honestly tell me, for those Mario fans that love the challenge of precision platforming that Mario does like few others, that it comes remotely close to scratching that itch?

@Benjamin

It'll be that way regardless. Because they hold the keys and that's how they work. Try questioning SJW politics on Twitter, whether in a reasonable tone or not, and see how long it takes for to be banned. Try it on reddit and see how long it takes for your comments to be edited to oblivion and for you to be shadow banned into silence.

If comment sections are closed, yes, we lose our voice their but they also lose their forum to push the narrative as well.

@Benjamin

It's the only thing that will help. Social justice authoritarians aren't interested in diversity of opinion. They want people shut down and muzzled for daring to question their enshrinement of identity victimhood.

@brandonbwii

And this sort of virtue signalling rubbish is why social justice warriors are going to end up being reviled. For you all, it's not about facts, it's about the narrative. It doesn't matter that talented women were offered a place and didn't want it, we have to force the issue. I didn't matter that Rolling Stone completely fabricated the UVA rape debacle, so long as it brought public awareness to a sexual assault epidemic that even the statistics of the administration that foisted the SJW-authored Title IX witch hunt regulation show to be a ridiculous farce.

I don't speak for anyone else, but I'm far beyond the point of being reasonable and civil about this. Because of people like you, that value narrative over fact and optics over merit, lives can be destroyed indiscriminately, just to show how bloody enlightened you are. What's been going on in gaming the past few years, it's not been confined there. It's a symptom of the same disease, and eventually that lunacy will be seen for what it is and be stamped out. It was in the nineties and it will be again.

@Urameshi

I agree completely regarding the story and have said as much here. Part of me thinks that the reason the game has rubbed some fans, and the general public perhaps, the wrong way is that it's done rather cynically: it operates on the premise that it's the general mode of gameplay that is important, with the story and characters being secondary considerations. For myself, BK and BT are beloved because of the world and the characters just as much as for what you do in that world. Yooka and Laylee are cinema marquee cutouts for all the dimensionality they have.

I understand that we'll never get another true Banjo Kazooie game; Playtonic can't make it and Rare, under the heel of troglodyte Microsoft, has neither the talent nor the desire. I've no problem with other games from the genre being made to take up the slack. I do mind very much when I'm given the games equivalent of The Godfather Part III after waiting sixteen years.

@KTT And that is a theme that actually could have personalised the story, and made it more that a twitchy Banjo clone: give the player a morality choice like the Little Sisters in BioShock. If you sell the book it gives you every achievement except the platinum. The only way to get that the only way to get that is to redeem yourself by getting 100% a second playthrough, refusing the offer and the tonic that Capital B takes before the boss fight either doubles the damage he does or halves the damage you do to him.

@Mogster

Agreed. What tiny interest I had in the title was just obliterated. Generations, for all of the gameplay improvements, was schizophrenic enough plotwise with the 2D/3D dichotomy. There's no way that a non-insane plot can be ironed out to take into account user-defined characters.

Do we really need another NES clone console? Where are the N64 HD clones? It's been almost fifteen years since it was discontinued and I'd really like to be able to play my Rareware games in HD without a dodgy emulator or an equally dodgy console mod.

@Jezebel95

Played it to 100%, just as I've done with virtually every game that I purchase. Believe me when I say that every minute I was hunting quills stuck in trollish places or replaying one of Rextro's mini-games for the seventeeth time, I was wishing that that wasn't part of who I am. I had to binge on Double Fine games just to wash the bad taste from my mouth.

@Jezebel95

'those are the things that make it so good for us backers!'

Perhaps the most asinine justification I've seen in regards to this game. 'Look, I got what I wanted! Aren't you thrilled for me!'

I don't give a toss about how much fun that you're having, or the other eighty thousand like you, and I would wager that most gamers aren't either. The negativity is a byproduct of you getting precisely what you wanted, which was mostly what others didn't want, hence why you had to help crowdfund the game in the first place.

@Hydrus13

That's precisely the issue; it is a cheap imitation. There's no plot of any substance, and no personal stakes on either side. Yooka and Laylee aren't going after the pagies to save the world, they're doing it so that they can reassemble their antique book and sell it for profit. Capital B isn't a criminal mastermind or insane megalomaniac, he's a mid-level corporate buffoon that relies on a absurd, stupid lieutenant and an evil redshirt army with two character models (imp and bruiser) and a handful of skins. In BK, you're trying to save your sister from certain death at the hands of a witch; BT is, at least in part, a revenge epic after your said sister's best friend is killed as collateral damage in an ongoing feud, leaving behind a wife and two small children. The Banjo series worked on multiple levels for multiple age groups. Young kids got a bright, colourful adventure, while slightly older players got a plot that surprisingly dark and adult in places. Yooka-Laylee is just blah.

There's no coherent level design within the worlds; the magic storybook theme started strong in Tribalstack Tropics, peaked in the magical snow-covered kingdom of Glitterglaze Glacier, waned precipitously in Moodymaze Marsh, and was unceremoniously taken to the back garden and shot by the time one gets to Capital Cashino. There's a feigned attempt to return to it with the plagiarism of Jet Force Gemini in Galleon Galaxy but that level is so schizophrenic in tone that it just feels sloppy and unfinished. Additionally, there's no effective sign-posting at all, no proper balancing on obstacle resolution to prevent constant backtracking; the existence of the Hunter tonic is more than enough to show that there was a sufficient lack of confidence for the a player to find everything.

The movement is a bit stiff in walking mode, slippery and occasionally uncontrollable in rolling mode, and both were hampered with one of the most stupid cameras I've encountered since the turn of the century. It constantly tries to zero itself against user input direction via the right stick, gets stuck on obstacles (walls constantly), even other characters (such as when I was racing Nimble in Galleon Galaxy, the camera actually fixed to him when he managed to pass me and I was forced to just stop and wait till he finished the race).

All in all, it felt mediocre on every level, an indie game with the wartiest possible connotation. It's playable, depending on how forgiving you are, but it's so far below the bar set during the golden age of Rare and that, for some of us, is painful.

@Tetsuro

That's your prerogative, but I, and it seems many others, disagree. You're welcome to that opinion and I consider to be 100% valid, I just don't happen to follow your line of thought. Wonder Boy did somewhat better with users, though that's not really indicative given that the review pool is one-quarter the size and the audience on the Switch, which probably constituted a significant percentage of sales, is more amenable to that sort of game that on the PS4 or XB1. Critically, it fell perfectly in line with Yooka-Laylee: the mid-70s.

@Tetsuro No, it's not unfair but it's not indicative of the general tenor of reviews, either user or critical, for the game on console. There are definitely those that are more forgiving of the game because they are amenable to concept of review with stipulations, they're the same people that spout the asinine notion that we should only evaluate the game in terms of what it's trying to be, not what it effectively is. What it's trying to be is a 90s platformer during the 90s, hampered, whether deliberately or not, with all of the problems of that genre. It is a 90s platformer released in 2017. The current-year argument, however much people hate it, is a valid one: the game was not going to be hugely popular, or in line with modern gaming preferences. The second that the decision was made to move from delivering to backers to publishing it to the community as a whole, all obligations toward contextual evaluation were destroyed.

@Tetsuro

The disproportionate positivity on a single platform leads me to believe, not without reason, that the majority of backers that received a play copy did so on Steam. Given that it was built in Unity, and how important smooth, consistent framerate is to a retro-styled 3D platformer with a camera that is mediocre at best, it's the only decent option. Speaking as an owner of the game that bought it on PS4, there are numerous stutters, and I've seen instances where the XB1 version is almost unplayable at times.

Even if they completely iron out the technical issues, and there were heaps when I played and completed it on PS4, it can't fix the inherent tonal issues and the utter lack of tension in the narrative. In BK, Gruntilda intends to take Tooty's youth and beauty, killing her in the process. In BT, Bottles is killed.

In YL...a mid-management bureaucrat wants to get a magic book to control the world. There are stakes, but they are always abstract, never personal. Neither Yooka nor Laylee experience any kind or degree of loss during the course of the story. They just want to get the book back because it looks old and expensive, and they want to sell it. Wonderful motivation for an adventure.

Add to that the broken difficulty curve; when I can defeat four of the five stage bosses with no deaths but it takes 22 consecutive tries to make it through Hurdle Hijinx, there's an major issue with the game design.

Absolute yawn. Sega simply does not have the confidence in the IP to make a straight 3D Sonic game without relying on a nostalgia-driven universe crossover/time travel gimmick, a la Generations because that was the last successful one, or an annoying partner NPC or team-based platforming, like Sonic Boom. Just give me Sonic, by himself, and racer controls so that I don't slam into everything whilst boosting and I'm good.

@NEStalgia

Agree completely. I beat this game, completely blind, in under four hours. It uses all of the cheap Castlevania-style platform and enemy placement tricks that were used to pad games back in the day, and the bosses were absurdly easy. This is a game with $10 worth of content that's been hawked for double. Unless one is a massive fan of the Monster World, or 8-bit platformers generally, there's not much value generally.

I'd much rather emulate ROMs agnostically anyway. No need to get Nintendo more money when their business practices continue to be insanely toxic to consumers. Why pay $2 - $5 for a game that's aged thirty?

That's a placeholder date, the 29th is the last business day of 2017, since games don't launch on weekends. Too bad about this though, I much prefer it to Fast RMX.

Pachter's support is the last albatross the Switch needs, given how consistently he is completely, utterly wrong in his prognostication.

@NEStalgia

"I'm not arguing it's an authentic accent, just that I'm not sure its authenticity matters considering she's not actually portraying a British character. It's a fictional land, so it's a fictional accent that sounds like another but not. They might not have intended that but we can fairly suspend disbelief here. It did sound "off" but it also makes it otherworldly a little so it's not entirely a bad thing. Fake accent for fake place is at least a whole different problem than "lets cast a Chinese actress for a Geisha and a Chinese guy as a Korean character because all Asians look the same anyway" that has happened pretty often in film/TV"

As for the 'fictional' out, that's destroyed by the fact that they used real languages in the voice acting. I imagine that's precisely why Zelda games up till Breath of the Wild employed text delivery only.

As for the rest, that's an absurd equivocation on your part. Korean, Japanese and Chinese people do not share a language, despite the minute intelligibility from loan words. The reverse is true with British English and American English. Minor lexical differences and slang aside, it's mutually intelligble. The primary difference between them is phonological. I'm not saying that Zelda should sound authentically British or authentically American, merely that she should be authentic, no matter which voice actor was used. If you cast an American, use an American accent. If you cast a Brit, use a British accent. Don't muddy the water because it's jarring. It destroys any suspension of disbelief because it calls into question the authenticity of the performance being consumed. A person that is affecting a non-natural accent has to devote considerable mental energy into maintaining whatever rules they've been taught regarding that accent, which compromises the performance. Even if they manage it spot on, the naturalness of the language is lost. It becomes rigid and inorganic. It's clear that they're rote lines being spoken in a booth, not an immediate performance, which is how it ought to be.

@NEStalgia

[em]I think most of the people that hate Zelda's fake British accent are Brits which makes sense. I'm not entirely sure why they went with an American actress faking a pseudo-British accent instead of just hiring a British VA (it's not like they don't have more than a few of those floating around since Xenoblade )
(And does the accent's authenticity matter much? She's from Hyrule, not Liverpool. Maybe Hyrule was once populated by Brits before evil robots murdered everyone? If an American or Australian accent is just a British accent modified by 200+ years away from the land of origin, wouldn't a Hyrulean accent be able to be neither authentically American nor authentically British? Are we overthinking this massively? Are we all OCD? Excuse me, I must rearrange the letters on my keyboard to be in alphabetical order now.)[/em]

The point is the have a voice performance that is consistent at all times. As a Brit that lives in America, I know when I hear an American affecting a British accent, and a Brit affecting an American one. You can, with varying degrees of success, adopt a foreign phonology but it's rather more difficult, and for many impossible, to change speech rhythms. Ms Summersett, I have to believe, gave a reasonable effort. It just didn't work.

@liljmoore

[em]why does every one say the English VA is bad. I love it.
Zelda British accent fits her perfectly imo and I love Revalis VA.[/em]

First it's not a British accent, RP or otherwise. It's a Yooper's approximation of one and a poor one at that; I know that because the missus is from Michigan, enjoys aping me to take the piss about my occasionally posh tendencies. Perhaps General American speakers can't hear it but it's painfully clear that it's an affect; the cadence and syllabic emphasis are entirely wrong, the vowel sounds insufficiently round. Is it more serviceable that, say, RDJ in the Holmes films? Sure, but that's hardly saying anything.

Second, the actress' chosen voice is whingy and gratingly melodramatic. It requires a singularly good performer to convey sorrow or fear verbally, in a convincing fashion, and Ms Summersett, whatever her past work and qualifications, did not have the ability in my own estimation.

I collected enough to max out my inventory before I finished the game. I'm never going back to it, so I suppose that I'll just miss out on having collected a burnished turd.

@BiasedSonyFan

Are you suggesting that the Switch wouldn't have been successful if it launched during the holiday season, against its so-called competition?

Re-read what I wrote. Novel competitor. Something newly launching at the same time. The PS4 and XB1 had to divide an single audience between them, as they were launched within a week of each other immediately prior to Christmas 2013. If the Switch were launched against either one during their launch period, to say nothing of both, and at the current price point, then yes, I absolutely think that it would get crushed.

I'm aware of the tax break season in the U.S. It still pales in comparison to the holiday season; over the past decade, the most console hardware is sold during the holiday season, and it's not even close. You cannot argue against that fact.

I'm not arguing against that. I am arguing against the idea that a March launch, absent a novel competitor and during a period when Nintendo's single largest regional market has excess discretionary income, played absolutely no part in the system posting the numbers that it did.

As has been discussed before, the PS4 and Xbox One aren't even direct competitors for the Switch. Many gamers who are in the market for the Switch aren't the kind of gamers who find the PS4 or Xbox One appealing.

And as has been discussed before, you'd better hope that's rubbish because the system isn't going to draw casuals, not as a single-use device in a world populated by easily available tablets with cheap, or even free-to-play, games and that costs the same or more than traditional consoles that have far better performance and much larger, and broader, libraries. If you're expecting the Switch to sell on casuals an Nintendo diehards exclusively, and to post stronger lifetime sales than the Wii U, then you've lost the plot.

@DanteSolablood

To tackle your points directly though, the Wii U was launched nearly a clear year ahead of both the Xbox One and PS4 so it was hardly handicapped by competition from it's rivals either. While you have a much better point with regards to Zelda, both the Wii U and Wii had much better general launch line-ups (unless you're going to say Assassins Creed, Arkham City & Darksiders 2 aren't system sellers).

Yes, it did sell unapposed, and it sold 22% of its lifetime sales, or roughly equivalent to its entire Japan lifetime movement, in the first month of retail availability. If you're suggesting a similar trajectory for the Switch, then Nintendo has a real problem.

As for the Wii U being a crucible creating a "community of up 14m diehard cheerleaders that will literally purchase anything that Nintendo releases" tell that to @Sligeach_Eire that was so burned by the WiiU and how Nintendo treated it's fans that he's pooping on the Switch in nearly every comment section. I'm not exactly sure you can count every Wii U owner as a confirm Switch buyer.

I did say 'up to'. Obviously not all 13.56m Wii U buyers are going to convert; in truth, I would be shocked if generational transition from the Wii U to the Switch is over 70% for that audience. My intent was to point out that there is a not-insignificant number of absolutely fanatical Nintendo supporters, perhaps the most passionate fandom in gaming (look at the response to Jim Sterling's BotW review), that will literally purchase anything that Nintendo releases, and the numbers of those people are far in excess of the estimated 1.5 million sales. In reality, the granulated numbers concern me a lot, especially the Japan numbers. It sold roughly the same amount in its first two days that the PS4 did. A high-power Nintendo handheld only did as well as the PS4, which has had 4m total sales there. This means either the domestic draw isn't there, and Nintendo knows and thus didn't allocate, or they don't understand their audience at all. That's a major forward concern from an analytical perspective.

However I do take your point that there are pull factors for the Switch as well, it's just my belief that the push factors have not been adequately taken into consideration when people rush to show that the Switch hasn't met the same kind of sales as previous console launches. The sales figures are still strong... anyone that expected the Switch to blow all previous launches out of the water were probably being quite unrealistic.

And I'm fine with that. What I'm not fine with is unvarnished spin when favourable numbers are posted and mitigative explanation when negative numbers are.

@BiasedSonyFan

Nope, most 'hardcore' gamers, that is to say buyers of the PS4 and XB1, and the casuals most willing to buy a home console are stateside. What happens in February - April in the US? Tax refund season is a huge time for people to purchase furniture and consumer electronics; consequently the Switch posted its strongest sales in the US. Nintendo knew that the Switch would have reasonably good home court advantage anywise, considering that XB1 sales are virtually nonexistent there and The PS4 numbers aren't even 1/10 of the overall install base. So they released during that time.

And before you bring up Europe, it's nowhere near as important in terms of sales volume. Two countries, the US and Japan, accounted for 66% of 3DS hardware sales and 72% of Wii U sales (US outsold Japan nearly two to one). From a standpoint of tailoring a release, Nintendo was more than willing to tell Europe and all other territories to get stuffed. They know precisely where their bread is buttered and they chose a launch time in which America, their largest home console market, had disposable income on hand.

Oh, good God, you again.

Yes, they were released roughly simultaneously. They were, in essence, dividing a single audience between them. The Switch does not have a novel competitor to divide sales.