It will really boil down to what games Nintendo brings to the party. My PS4/Xbox1 are huge dust magnets right now. Their 1st party line up has been decent, but too spread apart to keep them in the limelight in my household. PC covers 90% of the games I play, and with CO-OP functions on some, even covers what my consoles would have normally covered.
Other night for Thanksgiving, had the family playing Mario/Luigi Wii U. I never actually realized Luigi Mode was more of a sudden death mode with some quirks that had us all laughing at our stupid deaths and suicide runs.
Looking at the market, PS4/XB1 are facing some of their worst software sales in history. Hardware numbers might be up, but time to face it - PC is eating their lunch. I'm not saying PC is outselling console software, but when something like the famous Halo series doesn't even make a dent - woof.
Devs/Publishers are starting to feel the pinch of these AAA-budgets. Meanwhile Steam is getting littered by games a dime a dozen. The market is really weird lately. Haha.
Mario Go launches, makes millions on day 1, is slammed for not meeting expectations. What are these investors/analyst expecting?
80M+ PS4/XB1 owners and statistics disagree with you. Sales may not be as healthy as in 2015 but they are still strong in relative terms. In just 3.5 years the PS4's software sales are almost at 370 million copies!
"Sony also noted that software sales across physical and digital are over 369.6 million copies sold."
https://www.google.ca/amp/venturebe...r-the-brands-strongest-black-friday-ever/amp/
That's an attach rate of 7.39 games per console, approaching SNES's lifetime. We are roughly just 1/2 way into PS4's life-cycle, without highly anticipated games like Yooka-Laylee, For Honor, Resident Evil 7, Death Stranding, Detroit Become Human, FF7 Remake, Cyberfunk 2077, Mass Effect Andromeda, Ghost Recon Wildlands, Horizon Zero Dawn, Uncharted 4: Lost Legacy, Tekken 7, Prey, LOUS2, GT Sport, RDR2, Days Gone, Nier: Automata, GTA VI having launched yet. There are many more to come. Not 1 of these titles is scheduled to release on the Switch!
http://www.gamesradar.com/new-games-2017/
and
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/feature/game/30-most-anticipated-games-of-2017-3625293/
At the end of the console generation 3DS only had an attach rate of 3.52, GameBoy - 4.22, GameBoy Advance - 4.63, Wii U - 5.01, DS - 6.12, N64 - 6.83, SNES - 7.72, NES - 8.08, Wii - 8.84, GameCube - 9.59.
http://m.ca.ign.com/articles/2014/01/29/these-are-nintendos-lifetime-hardware-and-software-numbers
After only 3.5 years, PS4 is already approaching the attach rate of SNES. This is impressive since a lot of the major PS4 exclusives haven't even released yet.
Only 3% of all PC gamers buy dGPUs priced at $449 or above and only 15% purchase at $349 and above according to Jon Peddie Research. The vast majority of Steam users have PCs that are slower than a PS4 Slim. Making statements that PS4/XB1 are dust collectors coming from a PC user with 780Ti/980Ti/1080 level of hardware is not a reflection of the types of consumers Nintendo is going after who tend to buy consoles.
Using the logic you've outlined, ANY Nintendo console released in the last 20+ years was appealing to you. My friends who own consoles don't cross-shop consoles and PCs. They compare consoles and Nintendo is doing little to correct the mistakes it made with the Wii and Wii U to bring these gamers back.
> Switch is weak, overpriced, and will require extra $ above base to get a well-rounded package with a pro controller and storage. Due to anemic hardware specs for a home console, it appears to be not significantly improved over the Wii U to support next gen's AAA multi-plats. The wrong launch timing means major AAA games that were in development in 2014-2016 and scheduled to launch in 2017-2018 will likely skip the Switch. It will be too costly to port a lot of these titles back to the Switch since the port won't be easy and the 1st-2nd year user install base on the Switch will be too small. By the time the Switch has a decent install base, it'll be extremely close to the launch of PS5/XB2 that most likely will be backwards compatible with PS4/XB1 gaming libraries -- a death sentence for the Switch towards the 2nd half of its life-cycle in 2020-2022.
The only core difference between the Switch and Wii U, is that the Switch can operate as a fully autonomous portable. Otherwise, this console shares most of the major criticisms that were leveled at the Wii and Wii U.
Due to the use of SDHC/XC cards, publishers will struggle to remain more attractive in terms of game sale prices compared to PS4/XB1 games since the manufacturing costs of 32-128GB flash cards don't drop that fast. To save $ on smaller cartridge sizes, and to account for the anemic TMU and memory bandwidth specs, developers will try to use lower resolution textures (which they'll claim isn't major compromise in the 540-720p undocked mode). The console will continue to struggle to be a proper home console replacement. I am thinking Nintendo simply doesn't care at this point -- they are just going after their loyal 3DS/New 3DS and Wii/Wii U customers and hoping this combined group and new generation of kids will be enough to get them 30-40M sales over 5 years.