Does Nintendo Switch, which is three years late to enter the Chinese market, still have a chance?

About three years ago, Microsoft's XBOX ONE entered the Chinese market as an official product, reopening the door to game consoles that had been blocked in mainland China. A few months later, Sony's PS4 also followed suit, marking that China's game console market, at least on the surface, has been able to catch up with the rest of the world.

Of course, the sales of the domestic versions of the two major game consoles are not ideal. Due to various reasons such as usage restrictions, players are still more willing to buy truly authentic parallel imported products. Moreover, the purchase of parallel imported products in China is also extremely convenient.

But this did not dampen the enthusiasm of more game console manufacturers to enter the Chinese market. Three years later, news of Nintendo's entry into China finally came out.

Which do you choose, 720P or 4K?

When Nintendo enters the Chinese market, its main product will naturally be the Switch console, which was released several years later than Sony's PS4 and Microsoft's XBOX ONE. Coincidentally, Sony and Microsoft have decided to bring their upgraded products, PS4 Pro and XBOX ONE X, to China this year.

From the product itself, apart from the two-in-one console + handheld design, the Nintendo Switch is undoubtedly a rather backward product. It uses the ARM architecture NVIDIA chip from a few years ago, which can only achieve a floating-point computing power of 1TFLOPS, even less than the first-generation PS4 and XBOX ONE.

In comparison, today's PS4 Pro and XBOX ONE X both have hardware capabilities comparable to high-end PCs, with floating-point computing capabilities of 4.2TFLOPS and 6TFLOPS, respectively, giving them reason to achieve 4K HDR gaming and more realistic image rendering performance. On the other hand, even in console mode, Nintendo Switch can only provide users with a 1080P gaming experience, and its built-in screen can only reach 720P.

But is the Nintendo Switch really outdated as a gaming console? This brings us to the "gameplay" that players often mention.

You should know that as of the end of June 2017, Nintendo has sold an astonishing 4.7 million Switch units, and the product has been in short supply. This was only achieved with the support of a few first-run games such as "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild" and "Mario Kart 8", because for many players, games on the Nintendo platform are indeed more fun and attractive.

What is more important than hardware performance is the ability to provide players with gaming titles that are not available on other platforms. In addition, these exclusive games are excellent enough, which is obviously the consistent success of Switch and Nintendo products.

From the perspective of core console and handheld game players, there is nothing wrong with Nintendo's "money-making" strategy, but the gaming environment in mainland China, which was first developed from PC games, is not as mature as that overseas, so it may be difficult for Nintendo to popularize its ideas.

How to show the advantages of Switch to users who don't know Zelda and Mario after the small number of console users in China, who may be less than one million, have consumed it? Or how to tell users who are keen on mobile games the difference between Switch and smartphones? How to tell more ordinary users why the seemingly backward Switch is worth selling at the same price as PS4 and XBOX ONE? These are the challenges Nintendo needs to face if it wants to make a name for itself in China.

Games are still the only way Nintendo can take shortcuts

The uniqueness of China's console game market also lies in the strict game content review mechanism and the basic lack of a rating system. This is a big problem for Sony PlayStation and Microsoft XBOX, where the games on their platforms are full of fighting and killing, but it is probably a huge opportunity for Nintendo.

Generally speaking, games that can legitimately be released on Chinese consoles cannot be too bloody, too violent, promote the so-called end of the road for thieves, or show too much of the human reproduction process.

In addition to the fact that the domestically released consoles can run non-domesticated game discs, Sony's approach to "pleasing players" includes adding a "flashing" function for the backup system to the PS4 from the very beginning, allowing domestically released consoles to also become parallel imported machines; Microsoft recently launched XBOX Play Anywhere, allowing players to buy difficult-to-pass games on the PC and then download them from the console.

However, if PS4 is full of games like "Knack of the Adventures" and XBOX ONE is full of works like "Cuphead", do console games still need to face such difficult review issues?

It is bound to be not that complicated. Nintendo is not that complicated.

No matter from which angle you look at it, whether it is today's Mario and Zelda, or the future's Pokémon and Xenoblade Chronicles, these harmless works on the Switch platform are like cartoons suitable for all ages.

More importantly, Nintendo still has the magic to make these old IPs equal to or even higher in level and influence than "GTA" and "Call of Duty".

The Chinese version of the game console you are about to buy may be no different from the overseas version, which makes the Nintendo Switch seem like a perfect fit for the Chinese game console market.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.