As we all know, Nintendo Switch (hereinafter referred to as NS), a new form of Nintendo’s home console, has sold more than 3.6 million units worldwide since it was released two months ago. This sales volume has greatly exceeded Nintendo’s own forecast, and its hot sale has also caused a serious global shortage of NS. A few days ago, according to the Wall Street Journal, Nintendo decided to increase the production of NS as early as March, and planned to produce at least 16 million machines in this fiscal year. Now, the company may plan to produce at least 18 million NS units by March 2018 to cope with people’s crazy buying during the holiday shopping season.
For Sony, is it bitter and sweet to watch the sales of Nintendo’s new console next door? Bitter, because of the hot sale in Nintendo Switch; Sweet, because of the idea emphasized by Nintendo Switch, Sony put forward it as early as ten years ago.
PSV: Obviously I came first!
PSP era-put the host in your pocket
The concept of integration of host and PC emphasized by NS is exactly what Sony advocated when it announced PSP in 2003: "Play anywhere!" Play games anytime, anywhere! ), "Put the host in your pocket!" At that time, SCE’s club had a long history and Mujian was expecting PSP to become "the WALKMAN of the 21st century".
The idea of playing anytime and anywhere was put forward by Sony as early as 2003 when it announced the PSP.
The first batch of handheld players were trained by Nintendo GB series, and GBA at the beginning of this century made GB series reach its peak. However, even if there are masterpieces such as Demon City and Golden Sun on the GBA handheld, the 2D and pseudo-3D images displayed due to functional limitations make many people think that the handheld is a "toy" after all. At this time, Sony PSP was born. With its powerful performance, multimedia entertainment function and preferential price, it became popular all over the world once it was listed. The effect of the first escort work "Ridge Racing" is very close to that of the Ridge Racing on the PS2 at that time. I believe many old players remember that all the major game forums exclaimed, "Is this the picture of the handheld? ！” On the game software, the game manufacturers who have been constrained by the function of GBA are also delighted with PSP, and as many as thousands of games have landed on Sony PSP handheld. As the first generation of Sony’s handheld, PSP has achieved great success.
Sony’s exquisite industrial design makes the first edition of NDS look like a toy.
Look at Nintendo’s NDS handheld, which was contemporary with Sony PSP. At that time, the design was actually very revolutionary. The avant-garde design of dual screen and touch screen once again created new gameplay, such as "Support Group" and "Die for You", so that some games in mobile games have inherited this way. Under its influence, the touch function of NDS has become the mainstream and has been widely used in the game industry. The old rival Sony’s PSV even has a touch version on the front and back, and the home computer PS4 has also added a touch pad to the handle.
NDS touch operation mode is widely inherited by the game industry.
Nintendo uses this novel feature, uses completely different hardware features from the console to share the console market and expand non-core player customers. The horrible sales of NDS once again prove the success of Nintendo’s "Blue Ocean Strategy" in that year.
Sony PSP, on the other hand, is essentially a traditional handheld device that pursues security. Although it looks very radical with Sony’s excellent industrial design and powerful hardware configuration, its core competitiveness is based on the pursuit of powerful functions. Yes, function is the focus of debate on Xbox, PlayStation and PC platforms now-I have stronger pictures, better processing ability and faster game frames, so I am the best.
PSP has a game screen that shocked players at that time.
To sum up, we can see that Sony and Nintendo’s ideas on these two handhelds are to try their best to expand new users while grasping existing users. Sony uses powerful functions to turn the portable handheld into an audio-visual entertainment multimedia terminal; Nintendo hopes to expand its user base with creative dual-screen and touch concepts. There is no doubt that both have achieved great success.
However, although PSP’s strategy of "pocketing the host" succeeded, PSV, which continued this strategy, failed miserably. What’s even more strange is that PSV failed. Why did NS succeed with the same strategy?
NS: the master computer and handheld computer.
NS is a unique host. From it, we can see that Nintendo has continued its handheld portable mode, and at the same time, it has connected the host line that has played an unstable role in history. Its positioning is not so much a mainframe as a combination of a mainframe and a handheld. Prior to this, Nintendo experienced a fiasco in the console market, and WiiU’s GamePad handle controller with unclear design significance was listed as one of the most failed designs in the game history.
The GamePad controller with good idea has not been accepted by most players.
According to Nintendo, under the correct operation method, GamePad can complement the TV picture very well, which can not only make it like a PDA that the characters in The Legend of Ninja Dragon Sword carry with them, but also get rid of the distress of grabbing TV and playing games with their families. However, from the actual experience, this point promoted by Nintendo is not effective. For example, when playing Nintendo Mainland, it often happens that you will only stare at the TV for a long time, and then a line will pop up on the TV: "Look at GamePad!" Then you look down at the GamePad, but you will find that the picture is the same as that on TV. Or in the fierce battle of Star Firefox, you have to be distracted and look down at GamePad, and you will die if you are not careful. The "portability" it provides also has great limitations. The distance between the GamePad and the host computer cannot exceed 25 feet, the resolution is only 854 x 480, and the battery life is only over 3 hours. All these are fatal disasters for the play experience.
The poor endurance makes GamePad criticized by many players.
And NS obviously learned this lesson. Judging from the earliest promo, Nintendo told the story that WiiU hadn’t finished in four years in three minutes. Although WiiU host has new ideas, the game failed to let players experience the creativity of hardware. But the concept conveyed by NS is very direct, that is, the concept of "playing games with friends anytime and anywhere".
The release of NS just happened to catch up with the burnout period faced by mobile games after explosive development. When people who don’t play games are influenced by mobile games and become non-core players, the threshold of traditional platform games with better experience is lowered for them. In addition, the development of mobile chips may finally catch up with the performance of desktop chips, which makes what off TV function wanted to do but failed to do in WiiU era come true. More importantly, NS can also sell console games. The release of Monster Hunter XX is only the pioneer of console games landing. As 3DS enters the end of its life, more and more third-party console games should land on NS platform, which will continue to promote sales in Nintendo Switch. From this point of view, NS seems that Bisogni completed his slogan earlier: "Put the mainframe in your pocket".
The release of the Nintendo Switch edition of MH is undoubtedly a great news.
Enlightenment from the success of NS and the failure of PSV
We can’t deny Sony’s efforts in the handheld field. Although the sales of PSV are not good, it has become one of the two mainstream handheld platforms in the world. Sony’s Cross Buy function and PS3/PS4 streaming function can all see Sony’s original intention of entering the handheld field: "Play anywhere!" Play games anytime, anywhere! ), "Put the host in your pocket!" .
However, we can clearly see that Sony does not have enough resources to support the development of two game platforms at the same time. Compared with 3DS, the failure of PSV lies in Sony’s positioning of the handheld as a "mobile home host". This strategy has been consistent from PSP to PSV, which should have been the guarantee of its success, but it has finally become the heel of PSV. The positioning of "putting the host in the pocket" has become a burden for developers. In addition to functional problems, another important reason is that Sony lacks the precipitation and foundation of Nintendo’s handheld platform.
Before PSP appeared, Sega’s GAME GEAR was the only non-exclusive handheld device that sold over 10 million yuan.
Nintendo, as the first manufacturer to bring handheld devices to the world, has all-age, trans-gender and all-type game IP on the handheld platform, which is open to all users. Compared with the historically unstable mainframe field, Nintendo’s hard work on the handheld platform is incomparable to Sony. It can be said that the handheld is the lifeblood of Nintendo.
Compared with its contemporaries’ competitors, Nintendo has never had an advantage in handheld functions: Sega GAME GEAR, as the biggest competitor in the early stage of Nintendo GB series, had the highest comprehensive performance at that time, and the result was that the GB with black and white display easily defeated the GG with color display. Aside from hardware factors, there are 196 games on Sega GAME GEAR, 90% of which are Sega’s transplanted games. The monotonous game lineup has become the epitome of the failure of handheld devices in subsequent generations.
As an old sign of Nintendo, Pokemon has fans all over the world.
As we all know in the following story, at the end of the life of the GB series handheld, a monster-level game named Pokemon was born, which made GB glow in the second spring, and the GB series became the most successful handheld, and it was also the handheld with the most subsequent derivative models.
Although Sony PSP sales exceeded 80 million, but in the face of NDS sales of 150 million in the same period, it was still stabilized. One of the reasons why Sony PSP is not better than NDS is that Sony has not invested as much development energy as Nintendo.
In the second year after NDS was released, it quickly increased its sales volume to 20 million units with a series of games, such as nintendogs, Brain Exercise and Forest of Animals. On the PSP, it seems difficult for us to see Sony’s first-party masterpiece. After releasing the PSP, Sony’s subtle attitude is the same as that of PSV now, that is, it has not transplanted a large number of top-brand games on it, nor has it developed corresponding handheld devices, but has launched games casually and slowly.
The popularity of NDS can not be separated from the credit of games such as Forest of Animals.
Monster Hunter once saved the PSP (Japan), which was not the highest-selling game (Grand Theft Auto: The Story of Freedom City), but the topicality of MH made the PSP return to the positioning of game consoles from multimedia devices, and then the third party paid more attention to the PSP platform, thus developing many excellent third-party games.
Although MH saved PSP, PSV did not have such good luck. Sony’s PSP policy has been extended to PSV, but it seems to be more laissez-faire. The ridicule of "no trace of PSV" in Sony’s press conference may last until the end.
You can only survive for a while by playing games, but you can’t last forever.
Therefore, even though PSV absorbs the advantages of NDS’s success, Sony lacks Nintendo’s precipitation and accumulation on the handheld platform, and the two have different perceptions of its status. Gensonnie relaxed after the success of PSP, but the lack of topical explosive games such as MH greatly reduced the advantages of PSV as a "game machine".
On the other hand, smart phones do have a great impact on the handheld market. With the rise of smart phones, mobile phones can play PSV in all aspects, such as video, network, social interaction and taking photos. A great part of the success of PSP in those years was that it attracted non-core players to buy it, and at the same time, it could also serve as mp3 and mp4. However, these non-core players are easily attracted by better and easier-to-use mobile phones. These advantages of PSV have been lost, and its ancillary functions are far behind other mobile terminals in terms of convenience and compatibility.
To sum up, PSV, as a game console, has a poor game lineup; As a multimedia terminal, it is far surpassed by mobile phones. Although there is not much difference between 3DS and NDS in the end, with the strong first-party games and numerous third-party support, 3DS can remain (shrink) to the basic market of GBA, and still live well under the mobile wave. However, PSV lacks game support and has been lost in the mobile wave since then.
Is it too late to learn from NS now?
After the rise of mobile smart phones, non-core users have basically been nibbled away, 3DS barely maintained the foundation set by GB, and PSV ended in a fiasco. Just when we thought that the game industry would go further and further on the road of fighting for hardware, Nintendo creatively launched NS, and its success was not only "portable", but the first time that the handheld and the host were combined into one, and it was not the "conceptual portable host" such as PSP and PSV proposed by Sony. Nintendo can launch this product, partly due to the backward function of Wii and WiiU two generations of host products. And this product is also promising to make Nintendo’s long project "handheld" and its weak project "host" complement each other, forming an effect of one plus one greater than two.
The backward function of Wii and WiiU host products is the foundation of Nintendo Switch’s existence.
If Nintendo is born with a handheld gene, Sony is born with a handheld platform. Because PlayStation boasts that it provides high-end game platform for players, however, the characteristics of "photo-like image quality" and "super performance" are never comparable to those of the host.
PS4 can win the contest with Xbox One, and its strong function is an important reason. Since Sony has benefited from the hardware competition, the next-generation mainframe will certainly continue to move forward on the safe and proven road of upgrading hardware.
Assuming that regardless of technology development, Sony has now made a PlayStation Switch. The hardware configuration of this machine is the same as that of the PS4, which can achieve or be slightly inferior to that of the mainstream games of the PS4. Then this new Sony handheld may be successful. However, for Sony, it is very difficult and unnecessary to manufacture a portable mainframe with better performance than Nintendo Switch in the next few years due to power consumption and cost.
Concept map of PlayStation Switch
So despite Nintendo Switch’s great success, Sony abandoned its strategy of specializing in the host platform and took a trip with Nintendo to "put the host in your pocket!" The probability of this uncertain muddy water is almost negligible. At the moment when Sony is vigorously developing cloud services, maybe PS Now will become the mainstream in the future? If so, perhaps PSV will become Sony’s last pure "handheld".
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