Some interesting analysis from Mat Piscatella about the state of the industry.
- Exclusives aren’t driving console purchases anymore, as evidenced by Forza Horizon 5 most of all.
- Nintendo would likely benefit from this too, but they’re unlikely to do so anytime soon.
- It’s too early to predict any sort of success for Switch 2, as the numbers they’re seeing right now may be little more than the supply being great enough to reach their biggest fans.
- Overall demand for gaming hasn’t gone down and has stabilized. Those dollars won’t be distributed evenly, but the enthusiasts are showing up.
How many people are buying a switch BECAUSE of Nintendo’s exclusives? I would speculate damn near all of them.
Exclusives absolutely do drives sales and give the hardware a reason to exist. Nintendo figured this out ages ago.
Any logic about how the industry works based off things Microsoft does is…poor.
How many people buy Nintendo for exclusives isn’t super relevant. The important questions are how many more games would they sell if they were multi-platform, and how many fewer consoles they would sell if their games were available elsewhere. They would very likely sell substantially more games, but also likely see a significant reduction in console sales. This would still likely be a win as the games are far higher margin than the consoles.
Selling hardware if important for them and without exclusivity, they’re not selling it.
They would still sell a lot of consoles, the super fans are going to buy Nintendo consoles. The people that actually own multiple consoles in the same generation aren’t actually that big of a group, especially compared to non-Nintendo owners that would consider buying a few games if they were available.
Nintendo’s exclusives likely wouldn’t work as well on other consoles or would show significant bugs or problems. Their games are purpose built for their hardware.
There’s a few titles that have relied on gimmicks that would be difficult or impossible to do on other systems. It would be a temporary learning curve to get games able to support multiple platforms, but everyone else has already done it and Nintendo consoles have been the least powerful systems so it should be easier.
I’m not talking about being able to run on those other hardware. I’m talking about Nintendo devs literally being able to write code for that other hardware. You expand to numerous platforms you get more bugs. You need more devs. You need devs that know more platforms. It has nothing to do with Nintendo gimmicks. It has to do with building for more platforms just by default being more buggy (which is exactly what happens).
Cross platform games aren’t a buggy mess, everyone else has figured it out. Nintendo could do it as well.
Uhhhhh. Yeah, yeah they are. lol. Like, what a weird thing to claim.
It’s the only reason to ever own Nintendo consoles
Well yeah, that’s kind of the point.
Nintendo’s moat is quite a bit bigger, but they’ll likely see similar diminishing returns on that old strategy as the younger generation is just as likely to play only Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft. It’s not just based on what Microsoft does but how much demand there was on other platforms for their games that didn’t drive Xbox sales, and not even just that.