Nintendo made three big bets, and all of them were worth it
The Nintendo Switch is one of Nintendo’s most successful consoles, and one of the most successful consoles of all time, sitting just barely behind the Nintendo DS and the PS2. It’s hard to overstate the impact that the Switch has had on the industry at large, and almost eight years into its life, it’s still making waves.
Nintendo backed out of the power race decades ago. The GameCube was the last console, either home or handheld, in which Nintendo tried to compete on raw compute power, and it didn’t really translate to sales. The Wii proved that gameplay was more important than graphics for most people, and after the failure of the Wii U, Nintendo made a big change: it combined its handheld and console developments.
And look at where it’s gotten us in the years since. The Switch was such a home run that Valve took the ball and ran with it, bringing the Steam Deck to market in 2022. The floodgates were open, and it spawned a whole genre of devices that aimed to emulate what the Switch was doing in sacrificing power for portability. Not every device has been a smash hit, but it feels like just about every other company is trying to capture that magic.
The way people watch shows and movies has changed in the last decade. It’s impossible to buy a new TV without streaming apps built in now. Most TVs even have dedicated buttons for Netflix or Disney+ on their remotes, and the only reason anybody uses a PS5 or Xbox to access those apps is because it’s already on.
One of the most controversial decisions that Nintendo made with the Switch was omitting system-level voice chat. Pushing voice chat into a dumb little app was a decision that was almost universally hated by just about everyone. Who would ever use it? The answer was nobody, and I think Nintendo knew that.
For the most part, Nintendo was right. Nobody ever mentions voice chat on the Switch, and you don’t see a lot of chatter about it for other consoles either. That’s not to say it’s not used at all — plenty of people hop into a voice party on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S and play a few hours of Call of Duty or GTA 5.
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