Five years. Nintendo Switch meets next March 3 a five-year period between us. The Kyoto company launched itself into the void with a new hybrid proposal that was going to unify the desktop game and the portable game, and that, despite the obvious differences, was actually one more step in what was tried to be seen in Wii U Because, among many failures, who hasn’t always regretted not being able to take the tablet controller beyond the 4-5 meters that the console allowed?
The switch bet he had his share of risksince it wanted to try to boost the desktop market by cannibalizing -although at first it was said not- a portable market that was working like a shot with Nintendo 3DS. But the move paid off, and the Switch is on track to be the company’s biggest commercial success. Five years later, it is easy to narrate the success of the hybrid console: a light and much more powerful console than any previous portable in the house, designed to be played in different places and in different ways, local, festive and familiar multiplayer with joy-cons of protagonists, and all with an initial print catalog (from breath of the wild until mario odyssey in less than a year, along with Splatoon 2 and others).
The bet was risky: cannibalize the portable market in exchange for a console idea different from the rest; it worked, wow it worked
In 2017, the idea of being able to play titles like those mentioned (or Mario Kart, or later Smash Bros) in portable mode was very attractive. We have already seen the rest. A sales success that has meant that all the Nintendo sagas are making sales records too, that the indies have found a place where they want to be (many times exclusively or in the first place) and that Switch is part of the popular imagination, as happened decades ago with the Nintendo or the Play. With what this implies.
Five years later, the life cycle of the console doesn’t seem to be regressing. It continues to sell for millions, it has an attractive game catalog for all of this 2022 (and beyond) and the company is not in any hurry to find a successor, of course. There are games for a while and that is appreciated after a pandemic that has been noted. Naturally, during these years there are not minor ‘buts’. The drift of the controls chases the platform, there are announced games missing in combat and that should make a difference and the power that in 2017 made us dream of Breath of the Wild on a laptop, now it is fair for what the industry has advanced . It also doesn’t help to keep looking at the Wii U Virtual Console and lamenting that we don’t have something similar on Switch. But Nintendo is like that, very much theirs with some decisions, even if they seem incomprehensible.
A market for powerful laptops is on the way, and the first is the Steam Deck; we will see what happens with the successor of Switch and many others to come
So while we wait for a nintendo switch pro or a successor -both things seem distant-, it seems clear that the path of the hybrid console is here to stay. And that the portable market is going to open up to new proposals, as we have seen with Steam Deck, which arrives just to the market that Switch blew up five years ago.
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