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[NolbertoS]

You try the demo for Octopath Traveler yet?

Will download tonight and give it a try. Thanks for recommendation, man.

 

[Cerium]

Will download tonight and give it a try. Thanks for recommendation, man.

Have you tried Golf Story as well? Might be the best RPG on the system right now.

 

[redcrayon]

As someone who does almost all gaming on portable systems (I considered the GBA-thru 3DS to be my primary systems each of those gens, and PSP and Vita were in the top three the last two) the Switch still caters to me. It gets the same battery life as the Vita (It's actually slightly better on games that are always online), it's only slightly bigger. It can easily be recharged by a laptop caliber battery pack. I treat it as a portable that has the bonus feature of looking even better if I dock it at home at night.

It is a hybrid, but I treat it as a handheld and I'm sure there are plenty of others who do as well. It's definitely resonated well within the portable first crowd, so in a sense it is the true followup to the 3DS. It's also gotten a lot of talk as the followup to the Vita. It's also basically the redeemed vision of the Wii U, more or less. Take out the tv stuff and the asynchronous play and make it a sexy single tablet. It's also redeemed the Nvidia Shield Tablet!

It's a compelling piece of hardware in itself, but then to add the best first six month lineup of any console ever. The buzz around this reminds one instantly of the Wii.

I've had one for a month and still haven't taken the dock out of the box yet, but it's been fun playing as both a portable and in tabletop mode for local multiplayer. Looking forward to seeing how it looks on my TV over Christmas though.

 

[Zedark]

There is ownership overlap, certainly. And it really depends on the age group. Portables generally lean younger, consoles a bit older. And you can see multi-portable ownership per household, something that's much more rare for consoles.

Do you see portable age in general trend lower (eg PSP vs. PS3 or something), or can it be attributed to Nintendo's dominance in the portable area (since their audience is typically seen as kid-friendly and to skew younger)? Or is the assumption that the Nintendo audience trends younger wrong too?

 

[Hero]

Hey Mat,

Long shot on this but are you able to say how it compares to non-Nintendo launch systems?

 

[Square2015]

^I'll post the first 6 month HW LTD for all systems: (I have NPD back to '94)


non-Nintendo
XBO 2.6m
PS4 3.1m
PS3 1.3m
X360 1.5m
XB 1.9m
PS2 2.1m
DC 1.6m
PSX 0.7m
SAT 0.1m

Nintendo Home
Swi 2.0m
WiiU 1.1m
Wii 2.5m
GC 1.5m
N64 2.3m
SNES >1.5m*

*source=an article from around PSX launch comparing PSX first 6 or 7 month sales to the SNES, NPD data was referenced (sorry didn't have a link).

 

[MatPiscatella]

Do you see portable age in general trend lower (eg PSP vs. PS3 or something), or can it be attributed to Nintendo's dominance in the portable area (since their audience is typically seen as kid-friendly and to skew younger)? Or is the assumption that the Nintendo audience trends younger wrong too?

Do portables generally trend younger than consoles? Yes.

As to the other questions in here, I'm not sure exactly what you're asking or if I know.

Hey Mat,

Long shot on this but are you able to say how it compares to non-Nintendo launch systems?

The Nintendo comp has hardware releasing at all point in the year, makes for a somewhat okay but still not great comp.

Comparing to other releases, which are almost all Q4 releases, is not a great comp.

Once we get past holiday I'll see if I can work in some points on time aligned performance if there's a story to tell.

As to that last subject, I had hoped that between the data obtained for GBA, DS, 3DS and their console counterparts of each time period, there might be some data to suggest the amount of overlap in brand historically.

Cross-ownership can be studied through primary research. And we do cross-ownership studies, but they're normally broken down in regards to current consoles and portables. I'll look into this, but not sure I'll find anything.

 

[Vinnk]

The Nintendo comp has hardware releasing at all point in the year, makes for a somewhat okay but still not great comp.

Comparing to other releases, which are almost all Q4 releases, is not a great comp.

Once we get past holiday I'll see if I can work in some points on time aligned performance if there's a story to tell.

Thank you as always for the information. Yeah, after the holidays there will be some real interesting information to process.