I was talking about this with some friends. Anecdotally, almost everyone we know who plays games has a Switch, but very few of them seem to care about a Switch 2, for one reason or another. What will undoubtedly still move units are their marquis franchises, not the least of which is expected to be a new 3D Super Mario game. Mario Kart does extremely well for them, but I’ll bet some amount of its success is tied to very cheap console hardware, which the Switch 2 will not be out of the gate, so that parents can buy each of their kids a handheld to play with each other in the car, at the laundromat, at their siblings’ soccer practice, etc., and as the hardware gets cheaper, that probably contributes to its “long tail” of sales.
But yeah, for people who live and breathe video games, consoles have lost their luster. Games take longer to make now, which means there are fewer first party titles, which means we have fewer reasons to buy another machine that plays the same games as some other piece of hardware we already own. That will be especially true for the Switch 2, since they don’t have a Wii U library to plunder for titles that they can port cheaply for people who’ve never played them.
All that to say, my expectations as an armchair analyst whose word isn’t worth anything on the matter and whose predictions may as well be a dice roll are that the Switch 2 will do very well, but I’d be surprised if it did better than the first Switch, and I don’t know that we’ll ever see a console do as well as the Switch, or the PS2 for that matter, ever again.
Agreed. It will hurt not being able to play the new Marios and Zeldas (Maybe emulators will pop up able to do so, but it’s not nearly as likely as it was in the past - at least, not until well after the console is no longer sold), but $400 $450 for what’s essentially a walled garden Steam Deck that plays Nintendo games just ain’t worth it to me. The original Switch was worth it to me at $300 in 2017, but times have changed.
That first part really resonates because I experienced the DS lite. I didn’t see many phat NDS consoles, but kids everywhere had a DS lite. Mariokart did insanely well on that console, but not just because it was Mariokart, but also because of the download play feature.
It seems like Nintendo wants to replicate something like that through it’s virtual game card sharing feature. But it also seems like it’s a feature on the original Switch, so I wonder what new things they’ve planned.
I too will be surprised if the Switch 2 does better than the Switch. The 3DS, arguably the real sequel to the NDS, as opposed to the DSi, didn’t really touch the same highs that the DS lite did.
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I was talking about this with some friends. Anecdotally, almost everyone we know who plays games has a Switch, but very few of them seem to care about a Switch 2, for one reason or another. What will undoubtedly still move units are their marquis franchises, not the least of which is expected to be a new 3D Super Mario game. Mario Kart does extremely well for them, but I’ll bet some amount of its success is tied to very cheap console hardware, which the Switch 2 will not be out of the gate, so that parents can buy each of their kids a handheld to play with each other in the car, at the laundromat, at their siblings’ soccer practice, etc., and as the hardware gets cheaper, that probably contributes to its “long tail” of sales.
But yeah, for people who live and breathe video games, consoles have lost their luster. Games take longer to make now, which means there are fewer first party titles, which means we have fewer reasons to buy another machine that plays the same games as some other piece of hardware we already own. That will be especially true for the Switch 2, since they don’t have a Wii U library to plunder for titles that they can port cheaply for people who’ve never played them.
All that to say, my expectations as an armchair analyst whose word isn’t worth anything on the matter and whose predictions may as well be a dice roll are that the Switch 2 will do very well, but I’d be surprised if it did better than the first Switch, and I don’t know that we’ll ever see a console do as well as the Switch, or the PS2 for that matter, ever again.
Agreed. It will hurt not being able to play the new Marios and Zeldas (Maybe emulators will pop up able to do so, but it’s not nearly as likely as it was in the past - at least, not until well after the console is no longer sold), but
$400$450 for what’s essentially a walled garden Steam Deck that plays Nintendo games just ain’t worth it to me. The original Switch was worth it to me at $300 in 2017, but times have changed.That first part really resonates because I experienced the DS lite. I didn’t see many phat NDS consoles, but kids everywhere had a DS lite. Mariokart did insanely well on that console, but not just because it was Mariokart, but also because of the download play feature.
It seems like Nintendo wants to replicate something like that through it’s virtual game card sharing feature. But it also seems like it’s a feature on the original Switch, so I wonder what new things they’ve planned.
I too will be surprised if the Switch 2 does better than the Switch. The 3DS, arguably the real sequel to the NDS, as opposed to the DSi, didn’t really touch the same highs that the DS lite did.