Oh yeah, that thing! It probably made them a couple of bucks! 
And now they’ve announced some Pokemon games for the Switch that integrate with Go on mobile devices, so that should be good for a few more truckloads of money for them. 
And made it so big precisely because it’s targeted to casual gamers, or people who don’t consider themselves gamers, but who play games… if you look at it one way, it doesn’t make any goddamned sense, but if you look at it from a different perspective, it’s perfectly obvious what they’re doing: Making games which are quick hits of fun, which you can play in line at the grocery store or something, as opposed to deeper games which basically replace watching Netflix for that day’s off hours.
Both kinds of games are games. Both kinds of games have always existed, with the caveat that older systems couldn’t support much depth in terms of storyline and strategic depth. Nintendo has ceded the deep console gamers to Sony and Microsoft, and instead focuses on casual games for people who will game for brief stretches at a time, usually at a party or similar.
And this isn’t new: The Game Boy had Tetris, which is the condition to which all casual games aspire, and the platform as a whole was inspired by a Nintendo executive seeing a Japanese businessman playing with a calculator on the train home from work. To take a somewhat different tack, the NES was a NOT A CONSOLE DON’T CALL IT A CONSOLE-console because it launched after the Crash and consoles had the stench of death on them on this side of the Pacific, so it tried hard to appeal to people who knew that home video games were as dead as Pong, that is, not gamers.
Couple questions, then.
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Why doesn’t Nintendo just make the next-gen graphics powerhouse in addition to releasing their main big games? I thought SNES and N64 kind of were like this.
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Is the Switch their current portable system as well as their main console? Did they merge portable and console? Or are they still promoting the 3DS?
Corollary: Why is Mario so much fun? I’ve never played one and looking at the odd screenshot doesn’t suggest anything particularly enthralling. I played a Zelda game and didn’t get far into it before giving it away. I’m happy to accept that “those games just aren’t for you” but I’m curious why others like them.
Every business venture has costs. It costs money to develop and make a next-gen graphics powerhouse. And it costs about the same amount to do it no matter how many other companies are. But the money you make from it does depend on your competition. If Nintendo did make a graphics powerhouse, they’d get at most a third of that pie, and probably less, because the other two already have established fanbases. They’ve decided that that’s not enough to justify the expense.
Because the N64 was sortof a failure? (Yeah yeah, everyone remembers it fondly, but everyone remembers the Dreamcast fondly too.) Because Nintendo doesn’t want to lose piles of money on their console sales and try to earn it back on games? Because Nintendo doesn’t make games that require next-gen graphics powerhouses? Because that’s a saturated market? Because people who want Nintendo’s games are already buying Nintendo’s systems? Some combination of the above? Spin the question around: Why WOULD Nintendo make a next-gen graphics powerhouse to compete with the money-losing Xbox1 and the dominant PS4? Why would they want to enter a very expensive, very competitive space when they basically already have a license to print money in their own arena with virtually no meaningful competition?
Well, they just released the poorly named “New 2DS XL” last summer so I don’t think they are abandoning that line just yet - they’ve certainly made a pretty good pile of money on it, and lets be honest, they are the only remaining dedicated portable gaming system in the global market (I think the PS Vita is alas, still a thing in Japan) and it’s about half the price of the Switch, so it PROBABLY serves a different market?
In terms of raw grunt, nintendo were sometimes near the top of the tree but have never clung to that and made it a defining feature to the extent that the poly-pushing feats of Microsoft and Sony have. They have settled for “good enough to play the games we want to make, in the way we want to play them and still be profitable”.
BOTW looks gorgeous in a way that photo-realism never can, I’ve just got “Doom” for the Switch I could not care one jot that I’m playing 30fps rather than 60fps and that the resolution is not 4k because…I’m playing it on the train! or I’m playing it on the living room TV and when my wife wants to watch something I just pick it up and carry on playing or slot it into the dock in our bedroom…it is a game changer.
As long as the 3ds makes money they’ll promote it I’m sure but to a great extent, yes. The Switch is now the one console to rule them all. I would not be surprised to see upgrades to the core system in the same way as they did with the “DS” stable.
As to the OP, it really is the fact that the games tend to be real show-stoppers. There is real anticipation in our house when we think of more DLC for BOTW, or a Pikmin 4 game.
I don’t know if I’d go to the mat saying that Nintendo’s products are “more fun” than what other people are making. However, they do tend to have a pretty casual learning curve and bright cartoonish graphics. I think these invite people who otherwise would be intimidated by “Gritty Shooter #377” or “2deep4u Moralistic Quandary Simulator” to pick up a controller and give it a shot. Plus the games are really well built for couch co-op and party situations. I think you naturally take a more casual attitude towards kart racing and spraying paint than towards hyper-realistic Formula racing or explosive headshots and squad tactics. So even losing repeatedly doesn’t feel so bad.
Not a Nintendo product but I remember that my first foray into online shooters was Team Fortress 2. Despite getting repeatedly toasted, the cartoonish look of it and not-very-serious nature made me brush it off a lot easier than I probably would have reacted to getting annihilated every twenty seconds in a “realistic” modern combat shooter. When you’re trying to invite people to take that first step, then silly and breezy can really help.
Edit: “Casual learning curve” doesn’t mean you can’t get insanely good at them. Just that no one is handing you a controller with 16 buttons and leaving you to decipher how to deploy a medic kit in combat.
The console world was very different back in the era of the SNES and the N64: When the SNES was new, Nintendo was still dominant in the American console market. That dominance was challenged, but not disrupted, by the Sega Genesis.
Nintendo’s marketshare wasn’t surpassed until Sony released the PlayStation, dominating the N64, which wasn’t as technically advanced in some ways. For example, the PlayStation used disks, not cartridges like the N64, so it could also play DVDs, which was a fairly major selling point when it was new. The fact the PlayStation was released a year before the N64 certainly helped as well, but the big fact of that era of console gaming was that Nintendo no longer owned the console market in North America.
And that meant Nintendo’s censorship regime was no longer in effective control over what games were popular in North America. Back in the Atari 2600 days, Atari had no control over who made cartridges for the Atari 2600 (they lost a lawsuit) and no control over what kinds of games existed for that console. That lead to a ton of stupid games and a few really, really offensive ones, such as Custer’s Revenge, where you are General George Armstrong Custer, a pink stick figure with a massive erection, who advances under withering arrow fire to rape a Native American woman tied to a cactus at the other end of the screen.
Nintendo wanted approximately none of that. So they implemented a lockout chip, the 10NES chip, and the Nintendo Seal of Approval, which meant that all licensed games would be marked with the seal, and nobody could make a cartridge the NES would play without Nintendo’s approval. The 10NES chip eventually leaked, and unlicensed cartridges were made (mostly Christian games which are only offensively bad) but, overall, the system worked: Nintendo had veto power over all imagery and themes in all of the NES games most people actually played, and they set that bar at “sheltered twelve-year-old” in terms of what they let through. Douglas Crockford has a wonderful essay, “The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion for the Nintendo Entertainment System”, which lays out how it worked in practice, and how anal Nintendo was about a game which is a funny horror movie parody.
Nintendo kept that up throughout the rest of its existence in the North American console market, so by the time the PlayStation was released, there was a market for more adult games, games the equivalent of a hard R instead of PG-13. Rockstar Games jumped in with both feet with the Grand Theft Auto series and it was a massive success. Nintendo didn’t budge on its censorship regime, ceding that market to Not Nintendo (which eventually shook out to being Sony and Microsoft), who own it to this day. The advantages for Nintendo are twofold: One, they can keep their brand as the Disney of Video Games, and, two, they can keep selling relatively underpowered console hardware (like the Wii) for longer than Microsoft can keep selling XBoxes, because the family games they market aren’t very demanding of that hardware.
I can only say that Breath of the Wild is very little like the previous Zeldas that came before it. I can not recommend it enough. I hope any future sequels use it as the model.
Nintendo games are almost always extremely polished versions of whatever genre they are in – all of the audiovisual feedback and level design and the sorts of subtle stuff that you don’t usually NOTICE about a game, except when it is done wrong (and even then, most people just feel like the game “doesn’t feel right” or something, rather than being able to say exactly what’s wrong). They really understand this stuff, and design extremely clean, top notch products. Anyone can make a platformer (just about) but a Mario game is more or less guaranteed to be the gold seal of quality platformer. They won’t have unnecessary mechanics or awkward design, and this results in a positive gameplay experience. Obviously, you need to LIKE platformers first (though it helps that they are one of the simpler genres of game – the original Super Mario Brothers needed two whole buttons) but if you are even lukewarm on the genre, you’ll probably appreciate the quality of one of Nintendo’s products.
It’s related to asking “Why are Blizzard games good?” – because both Blizzard and Nintendo have enough money and the appropriate corporate culture that they’re not going to release a game until it is the best game it can reasonably be.
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that some of the headliner games for Switch (I’m thinking specifically of Super Mario Odyssey and Zelda:BotW) have elements that support both brief gaming sessions and multi-hour marathons. There are literally hundreds of mini-puzzles throughout Odyssey, so you don’t have to sit down with the goal of overcoming a gauntlet of challenges. BotW similarly has more than a hundred mini-puzzles to find (korok seeds and shrines) if you’re not in the mood to quest for Gannon. Mine is pretty much an at-home console, but that strikes me as a really good blend for games meant to be played on a hybrid system like the Switch.
I’m primarily a computer gamer, but I have a Switch for gaming with my wife. Nintendo typically has a more casual-gamer friendly library. The Mario Galaxy and Mario Odyssey games are very good examples of this. Each of those games has gimmicky power-ups. You get the power up, figure out how to use it in a basic challenge, maybe use it for an advanced challenge, then you’re done with it before it overstays its welcome.
The PlayStation had a CD-Rom drive, and couldn’t play DVDs (the DVD format wasn’t released until after the PS was - 1996 and 1994, respectively). DVD capability was introduced with the PS2 (released 2000), which used a DVD-Rom drive.
Damn. Shows what going from memory gets you.
The disc format did have advantages though - it was cheaper to produce and could hold more data than the cartridges Nintendo was still using at that point.
Anyway, the N64 wasn’t a rollicking success for Nintendo, even though by some measures it was a superior system.
Nintendo’s strategy is to not focus as much on hardware capability and instead focus on not only software, but also hardware innovations. They also tend to not sell their consoles as a loss, unlike the others, so they have to make hardware compromises versus the others.
They did focus more on hardware in the console sector up until at least the N64. They did decide to stick with cartridges there, but that’s a situation where both options had advantages and disadvantages, without a clear winner. And the hardware was definitely superior. The GameCube was more powerful than the PlayStation 2, but they did give in and use disks for some of the advantages.
From the Wii on, however, they’ve not worried about that. They innovated with hardware on the Wii, and it worked. They again did it with the Wii U, but that didn’t really work all that well, so they refined that innovation even further into the Switch, which did work.
But that’s just consoles. In mobile, they’ve always focused on things other than capabilities. They cared about battery life and keeping costs down, allowing them to beat out every other handheld in the market. This happened with the Game Boy first. Then they iterated on that when the tech was ready, and that went well. Then it happened again with the DS. And again with the 3DS.
Now they bridged the two concepts. So while the Switch actually is the most powerful handheld out there, it’s not the most powerful console. Still, the innovation of an actual portable console worked. They refreshed an IP that needed a Breath of fresh air. And they didn’t directly compete with the other consoles, same as with the Wii.
Nintendo has enough money from when they were a toy company that they could weather at least two more Wii U launches, as long as they do hit on a good thing every so often. They don’t loss lead with their consoles, so that will almost surely remain the case.
Nintendo’s magic.
The Switch is a pretty capable for a portable machine. It’s also little things, like “HD rumble”, that really makes it unique. I love my Switch and it’s all I need gaming-wise.
Mario and Zelda merchandise sells like crazy too. I see a lot of people sporting Mario swag.
The downside to disks was the load times which could be painfully slow on some titles. Cartridges have zero load times, content is instant. Also, cartridges could store info while disks couldn’t which was why you had to buy a separate storage medium to store game progress on a PS console (these days consoles have hard drives to fill that role).
I bought the N64 when it was released. The system was advanced but the game selection was anemic. The only games I enjoyed on it were Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, and Goldeneye. Oh, and the Zelda games. Third party support was severely lacking.
Yes, load times were a thing. I think the “store info” thing is sortof nonsense though. Given the choice of paying $40 (say) for each game, and $20 for a memory card that can store data from 20 games beats paying $50 for each game and not having to buy a memory card. All numbers are hypothetical, but I don’t think having to, essentially, pay for more storage with every game served the consumer.