Comment by nothis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nothis | Hacker News Reader

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Don't forget that, with the Switch, there was the opposite argument: "Smartphones are so common, nobody would buy a separate gaming device! If you want gaming on the go, you just download Candy Crush on your iPhone."

So the "lateral" thinking, here, was actually... quality. Smartphone games suck. The monetization strategies are downright predatory and touchscreens are a bad input device for a majority of game genres.

So what Nintendo did was make actually great games for a tablet device. Being able to put it on the TV and detaching the controllers is secondary, it's mostly about having great games!

This is why I'm a little pissed at marketing analysts turning this into some kind of stroke of business genius. The Switch is basically a Wii U with the GPU moved into the tablet part and the Wii U flopped hard. No market analysis could have predicted the Switch's success. It was a stubborn believe in quality, the worst thing they could do, what every "business advisor" would have warned them against. Market analysts were hilariously wrong and that's the history lesson to learn here, not "predulating quadrilateral core-market flibbugasting". The Switch is not a win they can claim, it's a win for quality and idealism.

The real beauty of Nintendo's strategies, I think, is that they validate many forms of analysis.

The design in them is never just great hardware, or great software, or great marketing, or any one objective quality metric, but some kind of blend of these things that defines the problem they are solving such that they avoid risking catastrophic failure in any one of them.

And this strategy whiffs on occasion, but it generally does so in a recoverable way: Wii U underperformed, but that meant that they didn't have to shepherd along the base with backwards compatibility. The biggest titles on it instead got ports or sequels on Switch. Nintendo never sells consoles at cost, so they lost development money but still came out of the endeavor with a refreshed game library. It's very much a "fast is smooth, smooth is slow" kind of notion.

And this is something you rarely see elsewhere in the tech world: The focus there is not just on making a gadget, but a world-beating gadget that boasts unsurpassed specs and rushes to beat the competition in doing so in the "move fast and break things" fashion. That approach leaves these companies with no room to build a legacy of the type Nintendo has, because their ambition was to skim some cream off the market, and maybe attain platform lock-in for a time, but not to really curate their own work or become something people refer to over the long term. And this is even true of most of the other game publishers, too: They burn through their franchises with casual abandon and trust heavily in their sales and marketing organization to make up the difference.

> Being able to put it on the TV and detaching the controllers is secondary, it's mostly about having great games!

If anyone doubts this, the Switch Lite sold 1.95 million units in its first ten days, and you can neither put it on the TV nor detach the controllers.

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