This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Nintendo Switch

Ever since Nintendo alleged that the Switch would exist a hybrid tablet/console that you can accept on the get or play from dwelling house, there'southward been churr nigh what the new console would mean for Nintendo'south 3DS. At present that the Switch has formally been unveiled, general consensus has been that the tablet is an astonishing comeback over the Nintendo 3DS or New 3DS, but merely a modest step frontwards compared with the Wii U. Given how dramatically the 3DS has outsold the Wii U (61.six million units vs. 13.half-dozen million units), it made sense for Nintendo to focus on the Switch as a stiff handheld follow-upwardly — but that may not exist the company's plan.

In a recent interview with Wired, Nintendo of America's president, Reggie Fils-Aime, answered questions nearly how the Switch and the 3DS would co-exist, mail service-launch:

3DS has a long life in front of information technology. We've already announced games that will be launching in the showtime couple quarters of this twelvemonth. There are a number of big games coming. And in our view, the Nintendo 3DS and the Nintendo Switch are going to alive side-by-side. Yous're going to be coming together different price points, you're going to be meeting different types of consumers, you're going to accept the newest, freshest content available on Nintendo Switch, you've got a thousand-game library available on Nintendo 3DS, plus some key new ones coming. They're going to coexist just fine. We've done this before, managing two different systems.

I think in that location'south a sense that Nintendo Switch is a portable device. It is portable. But at its heart, information technology'southward a home console that you can take with you on the become.

I think Nintendo is defenseless between a bit of a stone and a difficult identify. Showtime, information technology'south non hard to run across why Nintendo would prefer to have i console as a unified identify for all its properties. Bring a Pokémon game out for Switch, and you're going to move a lot of Switches. At the same time, yet, there'southward no backwards compatibility betwixt the Switch and the 3DS, at least not at launch. Unlike the Wii U, which has been moribund for at least a year, the 3DS continues to move both hardware and software at a brisk pace.

2306021_sd

Nintendo claims they'll exist side-by-side. Nintendo lies.

If Nintendo announces that the Switch is a 3DS replacement, it'll kill its own handheld sales. That could leave the visitor up the proverbial creek without a paddle if it later turns out that gamers don't like the Switch — and go on in mind, that's more than-or-less what happened to the Wii U. Initial sales were brisk, merely fell off sharply in a matter of weeks and never regained momentum. Unfortunately, sandboxing the 3DS as untouchable means that Nintendo is basically courting what'due south left of its living room market, and the Wii U's bottomless sales record implies there aren't a lot of those buyers left. Nintendo's Wii succeeded because information technology offered a right-place / right-time console for anybody who didn't take an HDTV or $300-$600 to spend on a new console from Sony or Microsoft. As a new handheld, Switch is vastly meliorate than anything else on the market. Strictly as a living-room panel, it's a modest step forward over and to a higher place the Wii U, not a dramatic spring ahead.

Our guess is that Nintendo plans to deal with this trouble through some good former-fashioned corporate misinformation. Think March 2022, when Nintendo promised that it absolutely, positively, would continue Wii U production into 2022, before completely reversing those plans (without albeit information technology had changed its story?) Yep. Wait something similar hither. If the Switch doesn't sell well, Nintendo will likely find a way to shove some games into the 3DS pipeline to go along that platform going. If, on the other manus, the Switch sells abnormally well and appears to be cannibalizing the 3DS market, it'll have a plan to draw 3DS production to a graceful close.

Bluntly, I'm not convinced the Switch is going to exist able to straddle the combined world of handheld and living room gaming very gracefully, just it's got a much better chance of doing so if current 3DS owners buy into the platform. I have no dubiousness there will be faithful Nintendo owners who will buy the platform no affair what, but whether it tin can build a market for itself outside the core faithful is anyone's guess.