Why do people buy a console instead of a PC? I just can’t understand, seriously.
I mean, when it comes to console exclusives, some can’t be beat. Nintendo and Sony have proven that console exclusives still drive sales.
Mat Piscatella of Circana makes a good argument that they haven’t proven that. A lot of Xbox titles became all-time PS5 best-sellers immediately after getting ported. People who wanted to play those games could have bought an Xbox at any point to play them before the multiplatform strategy was announced, but they didn’t. He would argue that people have already settled into their platform of choice and just wait for the games they want to come there. Something like a third of all console players (at least Xbox/PS) are only playing multiplatform live service games on those consoles, not any of the marquis exclusives.
And to be honest, that makes sense. In the grand scheme of things, there aren’t even that many exclusives anymore, compared to the deluge that there might have been in the 5th/6th gens.
This is a good point, but leaves Nintendo out of the consideration
And I don’t have data for this, because I’m not an analyst, and Piscatella shares what he shares, so all I’ve got are anecdotal observations.
- Some Nintendo properties have extremely strong moats, as Warren Buffet might call them. Pokemon, Mario, and Zelda especially. Even if a new property like Splatoon does well, it doesn’t mean it’s a system seller the way old exclusives used to be. The lower bound for this moat is clearly what the Wii U did in sales.
- Switch 1 was very popular with children, as the machine is cheaper and more durable than handheld PC equivalents. It was very easy to end up with multiple Switch 1s per household. The industry outside of mobile and Nintendo has done, from what I can tell, a horrendous job of catering to children compared to how it used to.
Speaking for myself, even if I wasn’t pissed off at how Nintendo operates as a company and decided not to be a customer of theirs anymore, they’re still running into the same problems that caused me to lose interest in PlayStation. They can’t put out enough exclusives to justify a $500 machine to play them, since I’m going to be playing everything else, at better settings, for the same or lower price, on PC.
Also I feel like Nintendo is losing its stranglehold on really good games in their own niche of wimsical platformers that are accessible and fun, but still provide some challenge if you seek it out.
See Astrobot. Hoping for more games in this same vein because its a winner.
Don’t worry, if they just add an empty soulless open world to every franchise (Metroid?) that’ll surely make their games great again.
