crispy4000

Well Phil, if you keep throwing around your fat wallet like a traditional gaming company wouldn't, your established competitors will need more capital too.

There’s issues with all of them, yeah, but nothing an experienced party with an established business couldn’t address. It’s more a question if they want in badly enough seeing the steps MS is taking.

Probably. In that case, it's high time for Google, Apple or Amazon to go shopping.

Absolutely. But after seeing this, you'd have to wonder if Microsoft would make a better offer. If I were in Sony's shoes, I'd look into a merger with bigger companies wanting a stake in their business.

Against better judgement, I'm holding out hope this will make PS5's easier to find soon. lol. Until GPU prices cool, most people won't be able to afford being PC and console gamer both. Or even to be on PC at all. It's still far and away the best option for game choice, discounts, freebies and avoiding recurring fees ... but that all matters for less when the price of entry has skyrocketed. I've been gungho on PC the entire PS4/XBO gen, but definitely feel pressured to find a console for the short-term. I will miss the days of 'console wars' being about who makes the better exclusives with the studios they already have. The rulebook has been entirely rewritten within the past 6 years. There's benefits to change too, of course.

I'm in a similar place. Don't play CoD, haven't cared about Blizzard since Starcraft 2. The few properties I am still interested in, Crash / Spyro / Tony Hawk, had their teams restructured into support studios for Blizzard and CoD work. Maybe the buyout could change priorities a bit. What I'm actually most looking forward to now is Microsoft E3 showings. Not only do they have a gargantuan 1st party base to tap into, but Activision hasn't had a real presence at the show in years. I'd love to see something (other than CoD) announced on stage by them.

If he meant portables-only then he should have said it. As stated, it's false.

I'm fine to keep going if you insist on making asinine arguments yourself to pile on. Nintendo's failures have more to do with than their own games. It stands to reason that their successes do as well. As I said, Mario Kart 8 couldn't save the Wii U. The game needed a better outlet to become the huge success it is now. That's the plain and simple truth.

Back on topic, Easy Allies did a thing:

They don’t, which has always been Nintendo’s problem. 3rd party games often did so poorly it wasn’t worth the while. Not just in relativity to Nintendo’s games. But poor sales period. That Fortnite on Switch generates nearly as much mtx sales on PC is actually a momentous thing for a Nintendo platform.

Indies selling better on Switch than elsewhere, AAA, AA and F2P ports that keep coming, etc. There’s more burden of proof to say that Switch would sell the same amount if outside developers avoided it like the Wii U. I don’t think it’s realistic to say there was no needle moved. And yes, I’d agree that Fortnite’s impact is more important than any other 3rd party game on the system. Just imagine if they didn’t port it.

I don't think the Switch would have sold as well if the narrative never shifted on their 3rd party support. Indies are part of that, so are F2P games, larger publishers, etc. Nintendo should never want to be in a position where they more or less go it alone anymore. They dealt with that for generations on the console side, and their flops hit harder as a result.

Only as well? That’s not true when you compare Switch million sellers to their prior handhelds. It’s doing substantially better. We should be asking ourselves why instead of just assuming same-old same-old.

I haven’t focused in on their core demographic, but rather how they’re broadening from it. If the Wii can be seen as Nintendo trying to go Blue Ocean with casuals, Switch was about making inroads with people who hadn’t owned or regularly played a Nintendo console or portable in some time. That’s what BoTW did for them. We just wouldn’t have seen Switch be as successful as it is without that. Unless you think it’s soccer moms playing mini-game collections again.

No, they won’t. I think we can presume the Deck’s largest demographic will be teenage males and up. (Of which, the Switch still has plenty)

Twilight Princess. Wasn’t the same impact, but at the time, the hype was deafening. So was the blowback to Gerstmann 8.8. Just saying they’re not competing doesn’t make them not compete. Again, what you’re saying there is just an assertion. Not an argument. I don’t see as hard of a break between their audiences as you do. Many people with Switches do own gaming PC’s or other consoles. Many of them enjoyed BoTW alongside other open world games this gen. It definitely feels like people here still treat the Switch like its appeal is limited to preteens and casuals. But it couldn’t have been the success it is relative to the Wii without new inroads into the ‘core’ gamer demographic. Seeing so many publishers trying to make XBO/PS4 ports work, with the difficulty of the job, speaks volumes to that. Even compared to phones its more of a traditional gaming audience device. Naysayers already said dedicated gaming portables were on a downturn with the 3DS. Switch changed minds, with buttons and full priced games.

Definitely not projecting my personal experience in that. I've bought a grand total of two indie games on Switch. I haven't played them in over a year. My admitted bias here is that I'm inclined to buy indies where they're cheaper. I'm not arguing that Nintendo's games don't sell best either on Switch. The relative attention and sales numbers indies get on Switch, compared to other platforms, is what I think fuels the perception that it doesn't experience Nintendo-like droughts. You see that on forums, from journalists, etc. The demographic that mainly buys the top Nintendo hits probably isn't paying much attention to indies, or droughts. Like those who mainly buy CoD, GTA or Madden don't either.

The point I was making was in regard the relative overlap in target audiences. It was obvious from the Switch's launch, with Breath of the Wild, that its base would include a good portion of Microsoft/Sony's. It never has been totally separate for Nintendo. But a watershed game like that for traditional console audiences makes it a bit more obvious.

As counter-arguments. The prevailing sentiment is that the Switch is well supported, has plenty of worthwhile games that play well, and doesn't have major droughts. That's how it will be remembered by most too.

The #1 game in that link should at least make you rethink your last point. Mario Kart 8 debuted on Wii U and couldn't turn around its fortunes. But its port is the best selling Switch game. Something tells me there's more than software at play here... Anyways, I've never said or implied that indies were the driving factor of Switch's success. But they did call attention away from Nintendo's longstanding problems attracting major publisher support. People don't complain much about game droughts on Switch, even compared to the 3DS, Wii or DS. That's because indies filled the gaps, shown by their tendency to sell better on Switch than the other consoles. Plenty of people made Switch their platform of choice for these games. The indie honeymoon phase never really ended. What would the discourse on Switch be if that never happened? Probably a lot more talk of collecting dust on the shelf for months at a time. Or Nintendo's weaker years being genuinely bad. The Nintendo Online library not doing enough to make up for droughts. The hardware feeling too outdated too soon. Game prices sucking across the board. And so on. Perhaps it would have translated into less hardware sales. Less software sales. Less publishers giving a shit about Nintendo. It's impossible to know the real impact. But Nintendo should be paying attention that someone is trying to do them one better with indies on a portable. They should be equally wary of subscription models and giveaways on other platforms creating greater incentive to play these games elsewhere. It obviously won't change anything of much substance for Switch at this point. Although it could for how their future platforms are positioned. Hopefully for the better, in how Nintendo responds and adapts. You'd struggle to see it that way if, as others here have asserted, Nintendo operates in a different market their closest competitors have no influence on. I personally think that's trying to explain away them having their head in the sand at times.

*While the Switch maintains its relevance Deck is beginning the next gen of handhelds. Nintendo will announce something new before too long. This is more relevant for what comes next than affecting Switch, where they’ve already built a huge install base and indie prominence.

Insert Disney+ and Netflix into that equation for a closer equivalent, IMO. And it only kinda works. Nintendo owns the dedicated gaming handheld market, so in some ways it’s further out still. But that’s why talking about other portables is relevant.

If anyone with a Deck stops buying indie games and multiplats on Nintendo platforms full stop, that’s a different threat to Nintendo’s business than the PSP was. I don’t expect the Deck to outsell the PSP. It wouldn’t need to in order to have a greater impact on Nintendo’s bottom line.

There was many reasons it failed. Making a standard console with a worse CPU than the 360/PS3 was really stupid from a dev support angle at the time. It took the Switch for them to finally get UE4, for that reason.