Nintendo's big bet after a decade, but this time the Switch may not win

I still remember that in 2004 and 2006, facing the powerful enemies PSP and PS3, Nintendo made a big gamble and no longer competed head-on with the radical Ken Kutaragi in terms of functionality. Instead, it took a different path and successively launched the NDS and Wii, two consoles with insufficient functionality but novel gameplay.

Nintendo's gamble paid off.

Wii sold 100 million units worldwide, while NDS sold an astonishing 150 million units. You should know that NDS is far behind PSP in terms of both functionality and multimedia performance, while the Wii released in 2006 is basically on par with the previous generation console PS2 released in 2000. Nintendo's winning formula is well known, which is to expand the gaming population with differentiated gaming experiences. NDS's "Nintendogs" and "Brain Training" and Wii's "Wii Sports" have attracted a large number of casual gamers who originally did not play games to realize the fun of games.

However, in 2012, the next-generation console Wii U, which inherited and developed the advantages of Wii, unexpectedly suffered a Waterloo and its sales plummeted, so that Nintendo had to significantly shorten the life cycle of Wii U and released the news of the next-generation console NX in advance.

At 22:00 Beijing time on October 20, Nintendo released a three-minute promotional video for the new console NX. The new console is officially named Nintendo Switch (hereinafter referred to as NS). The main function is that it can switch between home console and handheld console at will. The detachable control part allows NS to support single-player two-player games.

The news of the new console instantly ignited the enthusiasm of the long-awaited fans. The combination of home console and handheld console also aroused people's endless imagination. For a while, the sayings that "Nintendo will return to the top of the gaming industry" and "NS will end mobile games" were rampant.

Is Nintendo Switch going to save Nintendo?

Indeed, it is not a wise choice to compete head-on with Sony PS4, which has already accumulated a huge user base, in terms of performance. The improvement of the gaming experience by somatosensory and dual screens is already very limited. Nintendo's strategy of relying on handheld consoles to promote home consoles is a good move. After all, Nintendo has never failed in the field of handheld consoles and has a huge market appeal. After Sony gave up PSV, it has dominated the market. The huge game library for handheld consoles alone is enough to support the sales of NS. Then, relying on the installed capacity of the console to attract the support of third-party manufacturers, it is just around the corner to get rid of the notoriety of Nintendo's home consoles as "three graves".

Back in 1996, when N64 was released, Nintendo's iron-fisted president Hiroshi Yamauchi refused to follow the trend and use CD media in order to ensure the high profits of the cartridge production line he controlled, which indirectly led to Square's defection. Since then, the relationship between Nintendo and third-party manufacturers has always been very delicate, and this situation has continued to this day. "Call of Duty", "GTA" and other 3A-level masterpieces with sky-high sales on PS3/4, Xbox 360/One selectively ignored the Nintendo platform, causing Nintendo to gradually marginalize among the core player groups.

The light player group expanded by Nintendo, which began to take a heterogeneous route with Wii and NDS, is obviously not enough to support Nintendo's huge size. With the rise of mobile phones and tablets, the serious overlap with its target users has greatly affected Nintendo's business development. On the contrary, Sony PS4, which focuses on core players, has been much less impacted. How to regain the confidence of core players has become Nintendo's top priority, which is also the fundamental reason why NS changed its architecture in order to reduce the cost of third-party game porting. This strategy seems to have achieved some results. In Nintendo's video, "The Elder Scrolls" and "NBA2K17" appeared, and the number of announced partners has also covered most of the well-known manufacturers.

Mobile games have entered a vicious circle. Promotion and profit have become the lifeblood of mobile game manufacturers, and game quality is not very important. After the mobile game boom in 2014, the quality of mobile games has declined instead of increased. A large number of works that fish in troubled waters have been born. The time cost of discovering an excellent mobile game is getting higher and higher, and more and more players are disappointed with mobile games. At this time, Nintendo and Apple's strategy of launching light games to expand their popularity and guide mobile game players back to consoles has also been unanimously favored by the industry.

Why Nintendo is taking a big gamble

Well, with such a brilliant move, with the halo of victory in handheld game consoles on its head, kicking mobile games with its feet and punching Sony and Microsoft, wouldn't Nintendo be invincible?

I think it is not. The problem lies precisely in the conversion of NS from a handheld to a home console and the architectural changes to attract third-party manufacturers.

In order to ensure the game lineup of new consoles when they are released, Nintendo has always adopted a backward compatibility model for new consoles, almost without exception, even designing two card slots to achieve GBA compatibility in the NDS era. However, for NS, Nintendo announced that due to changes in the architecture, NS will not be backward compatible with PS4 and Xbox One, which means that the early software vacuum period of NS will be very difficult to endure.

Not only that, it may be difficult to find the remastered download versions of games for NDS, 3DS, and WiiU in the e-shop.

Firstly, this is because the cost of remaking is high. Due to the different architecture, even a completely unoptimized remake that has been criticized is equivalent to a complicated porting. If sales are not high after the remake, it will only be counterproductive. And first-party games with more guaranteed sales probably will not have this either, because under the pressure of software production, Nintendo probably won't have the energy to remake games for previous platforms.

Secondly, compared to NDS, 3DS, and WiiU, when NS is connected to a TV for playing, the dock will completely cover the NS screen, making dual-screen operation impossible. In addition, Nintendo has officially confirmed that NS will not support streaming, completely blocking the path for NS to reverse stream to the dock to realize WiiU play functions. In other words, NS will only be able to play games on the native NS platform, and previous Nintendo platform games will be difficult to reproduce on NS.

It also indirectly confirms the statement that Nintendo 3DS and WiiU will coexist with NS. NS is not the successor of 3DS and WiiU, but a pioneer in a new field. Starting from NS, Nintendo will draw a clear line with heterogeneity and re-enter the core game market.

However, this road may not be easy to take. It is a good way to rely on its own handheld game consoles, but it also hides dangers. Users' expectations of handheld game consoles are bound to be one level lower than those of home game consoles, but integrating these two consoles will bring huge challenges to the battery life of handheld game consoles and the functions of home game consoles. Compromise is inevitable. On NS, Nintendo gave up its huge advantage in the handheld game console field and tried to gain a position among the core players of home game consoles. It believes that this Show Hand gameplay, which puts all the chips on the table, is another gamble by Nintendo.

NS has little chance of winning, does Nintendo have a trick up its sleeve?

It is undeniable that Nintendo has many top IPs in the gaming industry, covering almost all types of games. What is more valuable is that Nintendo has a self-contained game production process, which ensures the consistent high quality of Nintendo's first-party games. However, consoles such as GG, WS, and NEO GEO X have proven countless times that a console cannot survive solely by relying on first-party manufacturers.

The seamless switching between home and handheld consoles in the NS promotional video, "The Elder Scrolls" and "NBA2K17", is indeed very attractive, but what is unexpected is that Nintendo said that the NS in the video are all machine models, and the pictures are all post-synthesized. Afterwards, Bethesda and T2 also came out to clarify that they did not confirm any specific game plans, which slapped Nintendo in the face. The authenticity of the list of partner manufacturers announced by Nintendo has to be discounted.

Whether the handheld function of NS can defeat mobile games is not the point for now, but facing the unstoppable Sony PS4, NS as a home console has no advantages at all. Whether it is the function or the game lineup, it is certain that it cannot compete with the PS4 which already has a huge user base and game lineup.

Nintendo cannot be unaware of these problems. Nintendo's current president, Tatsumi Kimishima, once served as a director of Nintendo of America and later served as CEO. He is an expert in business management. When WiiU was launched, he said that "being too similar to Wii will lead to failure." It is hard to imagine that Nintendo would make such a gamble with little chance of winning after several failures. After all, Nintendo has always had a huge cash reserve of hundreds of billions of yen and has not fallen into despair.

Nintendo's repeated statement that NS is not the successor of 3DS and WiiU is worth pondering. This reminds us of the fact that when NDS was announced in 2004, it was repeatedly stated that NDS was not a replacement for GBA. It was obvious that NDS was just a test to intercept the momentum of PSP. Unexpectedly, NDS received a warm response from the market, which was also an unintentional achievement. According to this line of thought, it is not difficult to conclude that NS is also an innovative console equipped with black technology. Considering Nintendo's previous statement that it was "afraid of being copied" when NX did not participate in E3, and the so-called announcement of the new console was just a promotional video without any console description, it is almost certain that Nintendo has a killer weapon that has not been revealed.

As for what this killer weapon is, there are clues. Shigeru Miyamoto, a famous video game producer and director and general manager of Nintendo's Information Development Headquarters, hinted last year that he was making VR games. At Nintendo's shareholders' meeting in June this year, Miyamoto told shareholders that he was developing VR products and already had core technologies that were expected to solve the problem of VR games being difficult to play for a long time, and that they were cheap.

Will this VR device be the NS? I think it is very likely. In this way, the relatively useless button removal function also has its important significance. Compared with PS VR, the NS plus VR box into an all-in-one machine can also solve the problem of wires. The VR games developed by Nintendo must be full of gameplay, which is exciting.

Of course, NS VR is just a guess. What other big tricks NS has in store and whether it can save Nintendo’s console business will have to wait until March next year to be revealed.

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.