As the article alludes to this is in large part due to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Which has a higher than 100% attach rate on the Switch, which is simply amazing.
It's pretty amazing that one game, available on a previous-generation console, is able to drive that many sales of a new console.
People are basically spending $360 to play BotW.
I'm interested in nothing else right now though - the rest of the available games seem like Indie shovel-ware or re-releases. Shovel Knight. Come on, that's like 2 years old by now.
I'll still buy every Nintendo game they make for this, but highly unlikely I'll end up with a sizable 3rd party collection on it. Got a PS4 Pro for that.
At this stage in my playthrough, I often have to explicitly toss out weapons because I have too many -- very rarely do I run out of weapons and have to farm.
I actually disagree with it being well designed. The weapons are too common and break so frequently I feel like I'm playing a weapon changing simulator. They have never been a limitation and I have never worried about finding a new weapon to use. However I do find myself constantly having to bring up the menu to change weapons. I have 12 weapon slots and pretty much every slot is a knight's claymore or guardian weapon.
Once you get to the point of farming the world minibosses you'll never find yourself wanting of a good weapon. Hinox and Lynel have good weapon drops and they drop pretty frequently.
I feel as though weapons should have been made more rare but more durable so that there were times when you wouldn't have a weapon because they were rare to come across and you'd second guess yourself about using your weapons on lesser mobs like red moblins or keese.
I find myself needing shields more often than weapons - since I like to go Guardian hunting and I kill them exclusively with shield parries. One or two missed parries and my shield is destroyed. While I rarely miss the parry anymore, it does still happen.
In other games you can end up with ridiculously overpowered gear, and then cheese your way through all the areas of the game that are note late game.
If you do this here, you will waste very good weapons on enemies that are not very hard. Then you'll pick up their middle-tier weapons. Or you'll just preserve your good weapons by not wasting them on cheap enemies, which actually makes things more fun.
It also runs the other way. If you go straight for Hyrule Castle you'll actually find precisely the kind of weapons you need for Hyrule Castle there.
You can sneak into Hyrule Castle in the early game to get great weapons, but they won't last forever.
The power issue is separate and can be resolved (or not, it's sometimes fun to immediately feel like a badass while never being invincible) in a lot of ways. I don't really see how permanent weapon damage would make much difference in those tradeoffs, at least compared to a game that has repair.
Weapons are dropped off of almost every enemy, and were never a problem to get, though there is a fairly high churn rate- most weapons have like 50 strikes in them (maybe 5 battles) before they break. There are a number of weapons with significantly more than that though (Zora's Diamond spear is like 300 iirc)
I never had to farm anything in that game though.
But now I have 4 or 5 more weapon slots than I started with and 3 additional ones elsewhere. And they are all full of different weapons. Now the hard part is figuring out which ones to keep when I come across new weapons, so I'm usually happy when something breaks because it takes the decision away :p
It's a little sad to see that awesome sword you kinda got attached to break, but....there's always something new to try. Two-handed spears, giant hammers - adds nice variety.
I'm yet to farm anything.
My concern with the Switch though is it's the same problem the Wii U had: Nintendo is likely the only company that will really make AAA games for it, and they can only make so many games. The next game I'm looking forward to comes in December (Mario), and Nintendo have not announced anything else compelling yet.
By making these oddball consoles, Nintendo puts themselves in an impossible position of supporting the console entirely on their own. With how much resources it takes to make AAA games today, they just can't scale up to the challenge. BoTW was in development for what, 5 years?
Moreover, I've also heard that a development license for the Switch is crazy cheap- like $500? I wouldn't be surprised if they're more interested in indie and "pro-indie" titles than AAA. I mean, look at "One-Two Switch"- it's almost more of a tech demo than a party game.
I actually don't know anyone (that includes me) who bought a Switch as their primary system or as the system to play all games on - everyone I know bought it to play Nintendo games.
Looking at the eShop now, it's Zelda, followed by some shovelware, followed by games I can get on Steam. Or the PS4.
There's gotta be some non-Nintendo Switch exclusives that are actually good and not just ports/re-releases.
Game is amazing.
(One example, I got Dark Souls for $5 and have 100 hours on it, that's 5 cents per hour. Sure I didn't get it when it first came out (otherwise it would have been more, though not that much more -- but at the same time I may also have put more time into it with more active PvP) but I didn't need to, I had other stuff to play. I've got quite a backlog, or things to buy to add to the backlog when they're on sale, of amazing games to play that I don't need to play the latest thing at full price. Or a more recent example, I spent $15 helping back Yooka-Laylee two years ago, and it took me 23 hours to 100% it, so 65 cents per hour. Suppose it was $60, though, that's still only $2.60/hr.)
But bringing it back to the main point of the thread, which isn't cost, what's Nintendo going to do next? They have a ton of unused/underutilized IP, they can't make AAA content on a similar schedule to the rest of the industry, and it's not because their offerings are just that much better. Additionally when people can have 100+ hours of fun with the launch title, why are they going to buy other games when they come out? The Wii was notorious for having a very low bought-games-per-console figure, even though there were several great games for it. I can't imagine many third parties looking at the Switch as anything but a dumping ground (when the added dev cost is low) for stuff they already put on other platforms. In a few years everyone will have a mobile phone more powerful anyway so maybe it won't be much work at all.
Sony has a lot of developers making exclusives, which is why I own a PS4. But virtually anything else is cross-platform already, except for the MS exclusives. And chances are, I'd get a 3rd-party cross-platform for the PS4 Pro before the Switch.
I don't know how Nintendo can dig themselves out of this predicament.
The last Zelda game I bought was Skyward Sword for my Wii. Fairly early on I ran into something in one of the dungeons that I simply could not get past. I just could not get the timing right for the necessary move. I think my reflexes have slowed down a little as I've moved firmly past "not a kid anymore" into "middle aged enough to occasionally have some stupid kid at the drive through actually try to give me a senior discount", and that was enough to get me in Skyward Sword.
Since Zelda games before BoTW have generally a linear progression where you must complete various things in order to advance, getting stuck pretty much is game over.
The reviews I've read say BoTW tosses that out and is very "open world", and there is almost no need to finish any particular thing in order to progress.
Is that actually accurate?
Some things may be easier with prerequisites met but are still 100% possible if they aren't.
What criteria are you using here? Perhaps you are not a long-time fan of the series, but if you are factoring in innovation and engaging gameplay relative to the time period, Link to the Past comes out unequivocally on top.
It really had no competitors. PS Move, while a nice technical effort, came too late and didn't have the developer support needed. The Kinect failed also for the same reasons on top of lacking a holdable controller so Kinect-games were ultimately forced to be super simple as waving and moving around can only do so much.
The Wii U had these types of games and they didn't blow up like the original Wii. I think its fair to say no one expected the Wii to take off like it did and unrealistic to expect Nintendo to follow the same formula and to get the same results. If anything, motion control games died fairly quickly as the fad ran itself out and are only coming back now as a much needed accessory for pricey VR systems.
I'm imaging Mario & Co racing around in shopping carts, grabbing and tossing bananas etc..
However, I am having a lot of fun with Graceful Explosion Machine and Fast RMX. They don't have the depth of BOTW, but they are good games that are worth the price tag. If there can be more games like those, the Switch could do well in the long run.
A lot of Nintendo fans are early adopters, that's why they're buying a console with one significant game in March. For the general public they need to have more on offer than that.
Here are new AAA games which we are assured will be out by Christmas: Zelda Breath of the Wild, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Skylanders, NBA 2K18, Arms, Splatoon 2.
There's tons of indie names (e.g. Shovel Knight) or older games (e.g. Skyrim) but those aren't "system movers" as they're already out on every other major platform. Meaning people won't be buying a Switch to play those.
No doubt you're moaning about me leaving out Super Mario Odyssey, but at the time of writing SMO has no set release date only a vague "TBD, Holiday 2017." As does Project Sonic 2017. Nintendo games overrun their release date as much as other publishers, therefore one cannot be assured SMO will ship before the big holiday period.
If you look beyond 2017, it remains pretty slim pickings for the Switch. Likely until at least summer 2018 we won't see more than perhaps half a dozen exclusive AAA games on the console. We still have no assurance that the mainstream Pokemon franchise will be developed for the console.
The Wii U also sold fairly well early in its life, but sales dried up and never recovered with publishers avoiding it due its poor sales performance. The key thing for the Switch to do is to consistently sell, to give publishers enough confidence that when they target the platform that the effort will pay for itself.
It all remains to be seen. I'll be paying close attention to Christmas 2017 sales figures because it might be the life or death of the Switch.
TONS of gamers didn't get to play any of them because the WiiU sold so poorly, so for a great many people they're 'new' games and worth buying the system for.
I think the prospect of putting AAA games on a portable system, will draw a lot of AAA studios to take the risk, if their game can be run on the hardware. I think the portability factor is a large factor of why they are selling so fast despite the lack of games right now. I think people want to see what its like to play non-junk/freemium/IAP driven games on the go. At least it was a major factor for me. I can't wait to play Mario Kart with my co-workers at lunch!
You know, I'm not sure. Those games are out for other home consoles, sure—but the Switch is not, precisely, a home console. Its form-factor makes it not just a substitute good for an XBO or PS4, but also a substitute good for a 3DS or an iPad. You know, a thing you buy for your kid to play with on car-trips.
And that means that those older and Indie titles—which wouldn't see very high attach-rates when ported onto current-gen home consoles—might fare a bit better, because they're reaching a market which didn't have access to them before. You can't play Skyrim on an iPad or a 3DS.
Its rare to find 8-player party games with simple controls that anybody can get into.
I like LAN parties, but the whole concept of them is kinda limited to the nerdy crowd. I'm totally a nerd btw, I go to conventions and play in those LAN rooms and stuff.
But opening up gameplay to my general non-nerd friends only happens through couch gaming. A lot of my friends straight up wouldn't get a chance to play in a LAN-party setup. But they come over and have fun with Mario Kart, Puyo Tetris, Smash, or most recently... Bomberman.
It's a completely free and open world, no grinding required, with simple gameplay yet with challenging layers that appeal to the folks with wanting more, a beautiful environment with amazing weather and climate differences and so on. Above all there is no in-app purchases required. It's a reminder of what games on the iPad could have been.
So depending on when these stats were put together, I could be part of the group putting Switch BotW sales above the Switch console and I imagine there are others who ordered similarly.