Some interesting analysis from Mat Piscatella about the state of the industry.
- Exclusives aren’t driving console purchases anymore, as evidenced by Forza Horizon 5 most of all.
- Nintendo would likely benefit from this too, but they’re unlikely to do so anytime soon.
- It’s too early to predict any sort of success for Switch 2, as the numbers they’re seeing right now may be little more than the supply being great enough to reach their biggest fans.
- Overall demand for gaming hasn’t gone down and has stabilized. Those dollars won’t be distributed evenly, but the enthusiasts are showing up.
EDIT: And now Sony has a job listing for someone to head an initiative to bring more games to other platforms, including Xbox and Nintendo.
Did you read the article? Because the thesis is that even if this is working, they could stand to make more money by not doing it. Piscatella’s thesis would disagree with this statement of yours, for instance:
And instead he’d say that people are happy where they are and would buy the game if it came to them, as evidenced by how high something like Stellar Blade or Forza Horizon 5 shoot up the charts when they get a port; FH5 already became one of the best-selling PS5 games for the year almost immediately, even though PS5 owners could have bought an Xbox to play it at any point. Or, not mentioned in the article, there’s the night and day financial difference that a PC port makes for the likes of a mainstay franchise like Final Fantasy. It’s not just an Xbox thing that he’s speaking to. Speaking for myself, I’d have bought Tears of the Kingdom if it came to PC, and instead I was happy to just not play it at all.
There is if the volume of what they’re taking 30% of doesn’t make up for the money they would have made by making Mario Kart, Zelda, and Smash Bros. multiplatform releases. There are no guarantees that Switch 2 reaches the install base of Switch 1, especially with headwinds from the general state of the economy, and that can change the math on that equation very quickly.
They can hope that, but as Piscatella sees in the data, getting people to move largely isn’t happening.
Comparing Forza Horizon and Stellar Blade to the likes of Pokémon, Mario and Zelda is, frankly speaking, an exercise in futility. You can’t extrapolate useful data by comparing completely different products, catering to completely different audiences.
Why would a PlayStation user buy an Xbox, like, ever? It’s the same platform, doing the same thing, but worse. Heck, even Xbox users aren’t buying Xbox at this point. PS users waited for FH5 to come to them, because nobody in their right mind would buy a $500 console for FH5 alone, and there’s little from what the Xbox offers that entices them to buy their console.
Nintendo, meanwhile, offers them a different experience (handheld console) playing completely different games (a lot of award winning Nintendo exclusives).
Third parties have nothing to gain from exclusivity deals but the initial paycheck, while console manufacturers keep cashing in from people who bought into their ecosystem and are now locked into paying them a 30% cut for all their purchases. Final Fantasy went multiplatform because the exclusivity cash from Sony was not enough to offset the missed sales from other platforms. There’s also something to say about a shrinking playerbase which makes the franchise less prestigious in the long run (as less players grow up playing FF titles, they won’t develop interest in/nostalgia for the franchise and won’t buy future entries).
That has nothing to do with the argument at hand, though. It’s a completely different situation for two very different players in the market that have nothing to do with one another.
A lot of people would be content playing Zelda on their PC, that’s the entire point. A Nintendo console has as much value as the exclusive games you can play on it. Port them over, and a lot of people would just… Not buying the console at all.
There is no chance in hell that 30% from all purchases from a healthy fanbase on all games, DLCs and subscriptions (and that’s not factoring in hardware sales, like consoles, Amiibos and other overpriced plastic thingamajig Nintendo fans spend their money on) is even remotely comparable to a 70% cut on some titles, especially if taking that 70% cut risks lowering the interest and engagement on their main platform. Basically, MS had nothing to lose, their 30% cut was shit anyway, but Nintendo’s cut is far more valuable and, at least so far, more enticing than the other option.
And again, that’s also comparing different products. Mario Kart, Zelda and Smash are not even remotely comparable to Forza Horizon. Most players either don’t know that FH exists, or know it but aren’t interested enough to buy a console just for that game. I know plenty who regularly buy Nintendo consoles because of their games.
Except that it is. Of the 70-80M XboxOne users who bought that console, only half that much have decided to stick with Microsoft through the next gen. Those people didn’t disappear, they moved onto other (more enticing) consoles. WiiU was a dumpster fire and Switch went on becoming one of the most successful consoles ever: where did all those people come from? Did they stop gaming altogether while waiting for Nintendo to put their shit together? No, they bought a different console, and came back for the Switch because what they saw interested them.
There is certainly a lot going on in the younger market and the generational shift will be something to analyze in the years to come, but Nintendo’s strategy is not without reason.
But that’s exactly the same reason I stopped buying any console. I was more than happy to let the handful of Sony exclusives pass me by, and then they started coming to PC. Now I’m more than happy to let a handful of Nintendo exclusives pass me by.
But that’s not driving console sales like they used to. The last few Final Fantasy games seemed to do quite well on PC, indicating that people did not buy a PS5 to play them, and PS5 is having difficulty matching PS4 units sold even with the utter decimation of their closest competitor. That’s another point you made later in your post; wherever Xbox players went, it wasn’t to PlayStation. Data would seem to indicate that not even all of the PlayStation players stuck with PlayStation.
Exactly, but potentially, they would stand to make way more money by selling more copies of those games than by selling more Switch 2s and getting those customers locked in.
Yes, there is. If you got 30% of all sales from games on an install base the size of the Wii U, it’s not going to make up for a game like Mario Kart or Super Smash Bros. selling 100M additional copies on extra platforms. We don’t know yet how well Switch 2 will do (probably better than Wii U and not as well as the Switch 1), but at certain thresholds, that 30% leaves them worse off than that other 70 that reduces the value of their platform.