Yeah, and parents love it too for that reason. People really seem to underestimate the market for children (and parents / family gifting and indulging said children), not just with gaming but also with e.g. youtube.

To add, people also underestimate mobile gaming; westerners still look down on it compared to console and PC gaming, despite the financials telling a whole different story.

Well I’m not a parent and switch is perfect for me. Would I want 4k? Ray tracing? Yeah sure, but it’s nowhere near a deal breaker. As long as it runs smooth I care orders of magnitude more about gameplay. Botw gave me so much joy, simply because it’s an amazingly well made game.

In my experience, graphics upgrades feel amazing at first, but if it’s a good game, you mostly forget about it after just a few minutes. But yes, sometimes you have very scenic environments, like in RDR2, but even then I feel like it’s 90% making good composition, color, lighting, and 10% is the actual GPU doing real time lighting etc. At least to me, this obsession with cutting edge graphics is just an expensive hobby of moving goal posts. I’m the same with TVs, I care much more about the movie or show than the TV specs.

IDK, mobile games don't tend to have a spending cap. On most PC/console releases the most you can spend on a game is few hundred for the game and all the DLC bought day 1 and usually goes down as time goes on. Mobile games will have one gem bundle or whatever that costs more than the complete package of a PC/console title. So you can easily get whales spending thousands on one game. The financials tell me mobile games are better at extracting money from their audience or a subset rather but that's kind of how they feel to play! Everything is geared towards extracting money.

Optimizing for microtransactions isn't free either! The devs increase discomfort and grind to encourage paying extra, making games worse for effectively all players-- in time or money.

> To add, people also underestimate mobile gaming; westerners still look down on it compared to console and PC gaming, despite the financials telling a whole different story.

Mobile gaming makes money because companies put slot machines into people's pockets. Actual games are a drop in the ocean.

It's not really a lower-cost alternative due to cartridge prices and no sales.

I chose Steam Deck instead of the Switch. Yes the SD is more expensive, but it already supports most of my existing Steam library and I can buy new games on sale.

On the Switch? The Nintendo eshop has new sales running every week.

Do their first party games also get those discounts? Another thing is that I can play games that I bought 15 years ago on my Steam Deck. Nothing like that is possible on the Switch. Even if you owned, say, Mario Kart 8 on the Wii U - you have to rebuy it again on the Switch.

I think it's a really smart strategy. They avoided the raw-power hardware arms race and are thriving because of it.

It seems like Nintendo picked up on what makes video games so fun early on while a lot of studios struggle with it even today: The gameplay comes first and it has to be fun. Art/style comes next, then way down the list is graphics. Graphics are the only thing about a video game that get worse with time. If you focus on making fun games that have a distinct style, they will remain fun forever. Importantly to a corporation, they also remain sellable forever.

Nobody talks about crysis 1 anymore, but people definitely talk about wind waker.

Totally agree. And Zelda is maybe the best example of this? The graphic style of the two recent games are distinctive and effective but are a long way from realistic by modern standards.

> They avoided the raw-power hardware arms race and are thriving because of it.

I would argue that they're thriving in spite of it.

Great gameplay and great art/graphics are not mutually exclusive. They're not even going to be handled by the same teams.