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Comment by xena | Hacker News Reader

Nintendo is in its own category in which the other competitor is also Valve. For now Nintendo is winning there.

I love great graphics but , Nintendo carved a nice big niche out for themselves by recognizing the constant drive for best graphics is a bit of rat race.

Nintendo has a tiny library.

Steam does not.

Steam Deck has a tiny install base.

Switch 2 does not.

I'm mostly a PC gamer but let's be real here.

Though, to be fair, my kids steal my Steam Deck from me more often than I try to get the Switch from them. The family share features of the Switch leave a lot to be desired.

That doesn't change the reality that the Steam Deck is a niche device.

I hope that changes though.

People rarely buy a platform for the platform, they buy the platform to do the thing they want to do. A game is just a genre of software.

It is far, far better to have tons of high quality software available for a platform, than to have an amazing platform, but a limited choice of software.

Nintendo has Mario, Zelda, Kirby, Donkey Kong, Starfox, Pokémon, and a few other less super famous and internationally known IP franchises. The core games and their spinoffs make more games than most children can reasonably expected to play through childhood and early adolescence. That the machine then collects dust doesn’t hurt Nintendo because they already sold it.

Yes Steam has huge library (my ‘want to play’ list is over 100 titles at this point) full of games of all genres, qualities, and niches. But Nintendo has more than enough to do what they have done for years, i.e. sit tight on their beloved IP and dole it out at varying levels of quality on strictly low end hardware and watch their earning go up.

Very true, but that tiny library happens to occupy like 80% of the biggest IP.

They have enough first party games which only release on their hardware that people are willing to buy a Switch for nintendo games, and another gaming device for everything else.

Sad part is that I would be willing to pay a substantial mark up to be able to play some of those first party titles on my PC, but since my kids have a Switch I just settle for using it. So even if I don’t think I’d buy a console just for their games, I’m gonna end up buying it anyway and Nintendo still wins.

Or the many people like myself who are willing to buy a Switch for Nintendo games and that's their only console.

Many times what happens is that people buy the Switch for Nintendo games, but since third parties also publish there they just buy games there anyway.

Funnily enough, I own a Switch and a PS5. I mostly buy and play on the Switch while the PS5 main function is getting covered in a thin layer of dust.

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