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Nintendo Switch Outsells Wii U In 10 Months (variety.com)
In less than a year, the Nintendo Switch has earned the designation of the fastest-selling U.S. console of all time. It has outsold the company's previous flagship Wii U just 10 months after its introduction. "Altogether, Nintendo has sold more than 14.86 million Switch units since its debut in March of 2017," reports Variety. "The company sold around 12.5 million Wii U's between 2012 and 2017." From the report: For Nintendo, this is a remarkable turn-around reminiscent of the introduction of the original Wii back in 2006. In fact, earlier this month, news broke that the Switch had become the fastest-selling game console in the U.S. to date, handily outselling original Wii with 4.8 million vs. 4 million units moved over a ten-month span after each device's introduction to U.S. consumers. Nintendo sold 7.23 million Switch units during the holiday quarter alone. The company adjusted its financial guidance for Q1 in light of continued demand for the device upwards by 33%, and now expects to bring in an operating profit of 160 billion yen ($1.47 billion), as well as revenue of around 1 trillion yen ($9.38 billion).
This comes as no surprise to me really. The Switch bridges the gap that has been hurting consoles in more mobile markets, by giving people a system that can be played on the go and put into a console mode when at home. I suspect they wanted to try this with the Wii U but the tech wasn't quite there yet and instead they ended up with a gimmicky screen controller.
The game library for Switch is a fraction of what the Wii and Wii U have. Why would you buy one? It's not even significantly better graphically.
ZIP
I would have bought one myself, if it could play my Wii games.
How would that all be practical in a handheld console that wasn't massively large?
are due to Nintendo fans who sat the Wii U Gen out. It's good for Nintendo that their core customers are back, but I suspect the sales will slow once they've saturated their existing market. e.g. this won't be a repeat of the Wii.
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AC posts get auto -1 ... AC posts are mostly crap, rarely gems.
Both are not true. AC posts start at '0' and many times there are AC posts that get worked up to 5. Unlike you, AC posters aren't narcissistic enough to feel the need to create a unique name in a pathetic effort to gain popularity and recognition.
The Switch was a brilliant decision as a mobile system. Will you get 8 hours out of it? No, but I think Nintendo went into this with a few assumptions and target markets. First, I think they assumed that most people wouldn't play the Switch in portable mode for more than 2-3 hours and that if most people were going to do that then they would probably have access to a power source while doing so. In the car? Use a power converter. On an airplane? A lot of [long-haul] planes have plugs now and airports have charging locations now. Their target market for the portability mode was clearly with people that commute via mass transit, particularly countries like Japan, South Korea, and maybe some European countries.
One of the biggest cruxes they've had in Japan in the gaming market has been the low installment base for home consoles. The market with the most disposable income (working adults) don't buy those systems that much because [at least in Japan] they aren't at home a lot. Handhelds are a different matter though, the installment rate on the DS and PSP (and Vita to a lesser extent) has traditionally been really good. This wouldn't seem like a problem on the surface but it hurts developers quite often because they have to make a decision between making games for the handheld or making games for the consoles. I'm convinced that the Switch will be heralded in the future as impactful as the Gameboy or the NES.