Game gear? Playstation Portable? PS Vita? Atari Lynx? N-Gage? Nvidia Shield Portable?
There is plenty of attempted competition.
Nintendo defeats all challengers.
Ya, so what? Tens of millions of NES/SNES/N64 users couldn't care less about Nintendo portable consoles. Not 1 person from my childhood I know who owned those consoles ever bought a Nintendo portable. What happened when these kids grew up? Ya, they moved on to PlayStation/Xbox and PC. This is reflected in the declining sales of 32-33M N64 consoles -> 21M GameCube -> 13-14M Wii U.
The Wii doesn't count since it's casual shovelware. There are less than 10 games worth buying on the Wii for me. I am pretty sure I am a good representation of a typical XB/PS/PC users, which means many feel the same as I do.
Some of you keep saying the Switch is a 3DS successor and Nintendo disagrees:
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/02/tatsumi_kimishima_talks_about_a_potential_3ds_successor
The Switch is first and foremost a home console.
As far as the comment about PC ports taking a year to come to the Switch, the proof is in the pudding. The Switch has the weakest game line-up across both 1st and 3rd party games among the 3 major consoles. Right now we can say 10M+ Wii U Nintendo loyalists and 10-20M+ 3DS Nintendo loyalists are all lining up to buy the Switch. That's not organic growth. Those early sales are easy. EBay is flooded with Wii U consoles on sales as Nintendo fans know that console is EOL, and will get no future support. They are selling Wii U bundles for $280-400 and will just reinvest that $ into the Switch. Again, these sales coming from Nintendo loyal customer base is easy. Same reason the first 10-20M Xbox / PS4 sales are automatic. Those sales don't matter. What matter is sales beyond 30M. That's when easy sales dry up and your console has to be well rounded to continue selling well.
It's obvious the Switch will get a bunch of easy sales to kids, and 35+ year old parents of kids, but what about the core gamers from 17-30? What about 50-70 year olds?
The current PS4+XB1 user base is crushing PS3+360 by 22M consoles during the first 38 months of their life-cycle:
http://www.vgchartz.com/article/267...ligned-sales-comparison-december-2016-update/
There are already 81M combined PS4/XB1 console users before the Switch even sold 4M. That means the traditional home gamer market is huge and is growing compared to last generation. Where is Nintendo? Ya, focusing on casual consoles and portables.
In ONLY Q4 2016, PS4 sold 9.7M consoles:
http://www.vgchartz.com/article/267285/ps4-ships-97m-in-q4-2016-total-shipments-at-571m/
The Switch sold out 2-3M units worldwide? Wow, big deal. Nintendo should be thinking Holly ****, our competitor just sold almost 10M of a 3-year-old console in just 3 months. Let's just live in an alternative reality where Nintendo doesn't compete in the same markets as MS/Sony. They don't because they gave up, while the total user install base for those consoles reaches 110-120M by December 31, 2017!
When was the last time Nintendo made a mature 1st party game? Zelda and Metroid is all they got. Mario can be entertaining but for only so long. Even during N64 days, Rare's Conker Bad Fur Day, Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie were much better than Super Mario 64. Nintendo has no one making that level of AAA 3rd party games. SNES was stacked with a galore of amazing 3rd party games.
Nintendo's core franchisees are aimed at kids. They have Pikmin, Sony has Uncharted/The Last of Us. Nintendo has Yoshi, Sony has God of War. Nintendo has Mario, Sony has Bloodborne/Horizon Zero Dawn/Nioh/Gravity Rush. Nintendo has Splatoon, Sony has BF/COD/Overwatch/SW:BF/The Division. Nintendo has PS360 FIFA port, Sony has every 2017 sports game: basketball, football, soccer, skiing, UFC, baseball, etc. Nintendo has Mario Kart, Sony has Gran Turismo and countless other driving games. Nintendo has Smash, Sony has Tekken, Mortal Kombat, Dead or Alive. For every 1 major franchise Nintendo has, Sony has at least 3-4 games in the same genre. The Japanese RPG scene of PS4 is so strong, it will take years for the Switch just to catch up. By that time, Sony will be on PS5. If a gamer wants a well rounded console full of all kinds of games, Nintendo isn't even on the map anymore, a far cry from NES/SNES days.
Why did Xbox 360 sell so well? It's huge 3rd party library that in many cases was superior than PS3's versions made the console highly attractive.
Seemingly the entire catalog of Nintendo games is aimed at casuals, kids and nastalgia, with very few new games aimed at adults and core gamers who grew up during NES->N64 eras. I want modern Conker's Bad Fur Day, Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, 1080 Snowboarding, World Driver Championship, Wrestling/UFC/Mortal Kombat, not Mario Kart 14 and Mario 35. This was exciting for me when I was 5-16 years old. Even wrt to Zelda BoTW, there is almost no chance it will come close to the story line and quests of The Witcher 3 GOTY, the mature themes of MGS V. Fallout 4, GTA V/VI, Elder Scrolls 6, Ghost Recon Wildlands, Red Dead Redemption, For Honor? Ya, most likely, not, happening. Ya, the Switch looks appealing as a 2nd, 3rd or 4th gaming device. That's not the place Nintendo was during NES/SNES generations; and back then the Genesis had an amazing library of games for its time.
For every one great Nintendo game, Sony and MS have 10X as many mature games aimed at 17-80 year old gamers. Let's face it, most 5-16 year old kids don't have $40-60 to buy games. It's no wonder Sony's PS4 already has the highest game attach rate out of all consoles of all time -- the average age of a gamer is getting closer to 35 and they have $ to buy games.
Sony offers Resident Evil 7 in VR, while Nintendo gives us 1-2 Switch, Arms and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
2017 will have the absolute best games Nintendo has to offer with SM: Odyssey, Zelda BoTW, and Splatoon 2. Lets see if any of them win GOTY.
The issues with Nintendo's approach to console to consoles is theirs narroe focus on gaming choices. If you don't want Nintendo games, the console has almost no value. This has been true since GameCube era. They don't want to offer consumers a console that has casual, kiddie and mature/core games. Even now I read on other forums how DKK Tropical Freeze is too challenging. That's the type of gamers Nintendo now attracts? Modern Nintendo gamers don't want Demon souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne. They want a Zelda that can be beaten with 3-5 hearts without dying once. It took Nintendo 21 years to create an open-world 3D Super Mario 64 successor. That's mind-blowing. If only Nintendo had more 1st party mature characters, they wouldn't need to create 20 different games with Mario in them. They could have superceded Super Mario 64 with some new character/mascot and made an awesome 3rd person open-world platformer. It seems even the people designing Nintendo games are making them for 5-16 year olds. No diverification towards older gamers has been shown in the last 20 years.
The vast majority of 3DS games is casual fest and grind fest games that appeal to Japanese gaming culture. Toronto Public Transit has 2.7M daily ridership:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Transit_Commission
Yet, in more than 10 years of living there, it's very rare to see people playing portable consoles on public transit. Usually, it's people playing casual games on smartphones and tablets instead.
What's so damn hard about Nintendo making a console where we can play RDR2, The Witcher 3, MGS V, Zelda BOTW, FIFA, Borderlands? So many Nintendo fans just ignore all 3rd party games as if everyone owns multiple consoles and PCs? Or do some of you just care for Zelda, Mario, Splatoon, etc.?
Sooner or later, the 5-16 year olds who want the Switch will grow up and their 30-40-year-old parents will be 50-70. These younger gamers will move on to Sony/MS and PC and Nintendo will keep pretending they can't win those gamers [well since they flat out gave up during GameCube->Wii U generations].
Nintendo may very well continue to dominate the casuals, kids and hardcore Nintendo fan markets, but it seems they don't really care about going after the XB/PS/PC customer. That's a 500M market [150M XB1/PS4 users by the end of the generation and at least 350M PC gamers per Nvidia].
At least I hope the Switch 2 is BC so I can finally pick up the key 1st party titles once the collection builds up to large enough to warrant owning 8-10 games. As it stands, I view the first 10-15M Switch sales as easy guaranteed sales.
Soon PS4 will gain the ability to use external HDDs. What's Nintendo doing? Some of you keep living in denial that MicroSD cards cost significantly more than shipping a game with multiple BluRays. Fallout 4 High-Resolution texture pack is 58GB, while a slow 200GB MicroSD card costs $50-70:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00V...card+micro&dpPl=1&dpID=41hicAWNJiL&ref=plSrch
It's just a matter of time before AAA games balloon to 100-150GB in size. How much is that going to cost in 2-3 BluRays? $5-7? What are developers going to do to fit 64-128GB games in the Switch? They'll be forced to keep prices of games high for a longer time since physical SD media takes 18-24 months to drop 50% in price for the same size capacity. It's going to be a repeat of $50-60 USD N64 expensive cartridge games competing with 100s of discounted $10-40 games on the PC/PS4/XB1. If the Switch is a portable, why are its games $60, not $40?