Should Nintendo Stop Making Consoles?

*Scott Davis, 14, is a junior reviewer for Phantom Sway. He enjoys dogs and video games and lives with his family in California. 

After a long wait, Nintendo finally released the much anticipated Nintendo Switch on March 3rd, but is it a good console? Recently, the Nintendo switch and nintendo themselves have been under fire from their fans. Many people are saying that Nintendo should stop making consoles all together, but should they really? I think not.

Nintendo has been around a very long time. From the release of the NES in 1985, to the Switch on 2017, they have been successful in changing the way video games are played. Many people can agree that Nintendo were making great consoles for a while, from the NES up until the Gamecube. But once the Gamecube was released it was a failure and apparently every home console after that was bad too.

People are mad at those consoles because they had crappy gimmicks (except the Gamecube). The Wii had motion controls and the Wii U had annoying double screens, but I think that’s what makes Nintendo great. They strive to take risks in gaming. Nintendo invented things like the start button, the select button, and the normalization of motion tracking and accelerometers. Nintendo has always been taking risks to revolutionize the gaming market, which means that they won’t have the best graphics or the most processing power. And people are still complaining about the switch.

When the Switch was first announced, people were hyped but as marketing for the switch went on they became skeptical. The main question was “Why are they doing this?”. People thought Nintendo was crazy for making a console that had weird controllers and had entire games play on a tablet sized pad. I might be able to provide the answer, but first we need to look into the more successful side of Nintendo – their portable consoles.

Starting off with the game and watch, and currently at the new 3DS, almost all of the handheld platforms they have released have been very successful. The only other handheld that can come close to being as successful is the PSP line, which doesn’t have many consoles. Looking at the wild success of handheld consoles vs. the mixed results of the home consoles, some might be left wondering “Why don’t they just switch over to making handheld consoles?”. Nintendo wants to meet those people halfway.

I’ve already talked about how Nintendo wants to take risks with their consoles so they can be innovative, but this one is actually a safer bet. With their huge success in the handheld gaming market, Nintendo plans on bridging the gap between home console and handheld. The whole goal of the Switch itself is to just get people to take their full consoles out with them and play it on the go. Of course they are still taking a risk, having to work with still being able to support full sized games on a small, portable console, but that’s par for the course for nintendo.

I know everyone who argues against Nintendo just wants the best for them, but in the end, we have to learn to trust Nintendo with their decisions, no matter how crazy their decisions may seem.

Scott Davis
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