Following a fairly warm reception from the majority of fans and critics, the Nintendo Switch reveal has led to a drop in the company’s share value, and attracted some concern from analysts.
The Tokyo Stock Exchange sees Nintendo’s share price was down 6.5 percent, pretty much completely doing away with the $1 billion in market cap that Nintendo added earlier in the week.
Before we go on, you can check out the trailer for the Nintendo Switch below to get a good feel of the portable/home console hybrid.
This drop in share value could be down to a number of things, but Dr. Serkan Toto, an analyst in Asia, believes investors are sceptical that the console can reach a wide audience.
He told GI.biz:
Sorry, but is a portable/home console approach really that innovative in 2016? I am most concerned about the target group of the device: who else but die-hard Nintendo fans will buy the Switch?. The Switch lacks a killer feature, and I think it will be very difficult for Nintendo to win back the casual gamers that are mostly on mobile now. In Japan, for example, the mobile gaming sector is already 2-3 times bigger than consoles. Even the PS4 struggles over here. It’s going to be a huge challenge to try to reverse that trend.
Superdata analyst Joost van Dreunen also questions Ninty’s choice to aim the reveal predominately at young adults, musing the console probably has a less broad appeal than the company believes.
He explained:
I have my reservations with regards to the breadth of the audience it targets. The Switch will likely be most popular among a younger audience: its functionality is uniquely geared toward pre-teens and teenagers. While the device seems much less like a toy than we’re used to from Nintendo, its features like backseat multi-player and the ability to have several people play using a single piece of the controller target Nintendo’s traditional audience. The reveal video makes a lot more sense to me if you swap out all the adults in it with kids.
Meanwhile, Piers Harding-Rolls of IHS believes that it’s important for the Switch to provide a focused experience and ‘avoid delivering a substandard experience by trying to be all things to all users.’
IHS predicts that the Switch will sell 2.85 million units worldwide at launch in March 2017, while all analysts interviewed in the GI.biz piece agreed that the console should not be priced at more than $300.
Obviously it’s hard to judge just how good (or bad) the Switch is before seeing a proper lineup of games, and just how quickly the battery life will drain – but it’s already looking better than the Wii U, which is something.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.