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Robo
Formerly Roboman, still
awesome
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Portland, OR
 
2017-02-25, 02:52

Well, I'm excited.

We...may have gotten ours in, and we might have been having Bomberman and cow-milking face-offs in the back...

The day one line-up is kind of meh but I think a steady stream of games post-launch is more important. What killed the Wii U's momentum wasn't what was available at launch (we quickly sold out!) but that there was like nothing until Pikmin 3 like the next September. If we get Mario Kart in April and Arms in May and Splatoon 2 in June, that's already way more to play than the Wii U had in its first year, and I'm sure they'll announce more at E3 for this year too (like a Smash Bros. Deluxe).

Long-term, I think Nintendo being able to put all their wood behind one arrow, development-wise, will only be a good thing. Nintendo basically sacrificed the Wii U to save the 3DS — the Wii U's first year was so rough because Nintendo was focused on frantically trying to turn their portable around. It's pretty clear that in the HD console era, Nintendo can't adequately support both a console and a handheld, and it'll be even harder to do so when both require HD development.

For marketing reasons Nintendo is saying that the Switch is their new console, but it'll clearly replace the 3DS too, eventually. I would be extremely surprised if Nintendo didn't have a smaller "Switch lite" with built-in controllers as soon as they could sell one for $199 or so (late 2018?).

People seem to be way more excited for this than they were for the Wii U, so that's a start. Their marketing and branding is on point and way less confusing. But will they be able to sell 75M of them (to equal 62M 3DSes + 13M Wii Us)? That's a high bar. We'll see.

and i guess i've known it all along / the truth is, you have to be soft to be strong
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