Curious what your thoughts are on why you don't think it's software related.
I've been in the room when major technology projects have needed to announce delays to key partners, and there is just as much PR bullshit there as public announcements.
The move, time and time again, is to focus on what the delay gives you, not what caused the delay. A delay might be multifactorial - lots of stuff not coming together - or it could be one major thing - a mission critical bug. But 80% of the time, the delay cause can only be fixed by a small subset of the people involved.
So you can spin the delay by talking about the stuff it gets you - all the things those people are working on with the extra time in the schedule. Some of which might even be super critical stuff that you were already kinda freaked about cutting from the launch, and you're actually slightly relieved that you can do them now.
If Nintendo has a four month delay,
of course they're going to spend that better prepping their launch year. They just about have to, all those software teams need to keep working. There are now reports that the plan is really to shore up manufacturing to prevent scalping. Which, again, it would almost be impossible for that not to happen anyway, when you have extra manufacturing time.
The leaks aren't coming from inside Nintendo, they're coming from publishers who are receiving Nintendo's company line. A line which Nintendo is communicating to wide number of partners, not just the ride-or-dies, a line which Nintendo had to know would leak.
It could be software, it could be hardware. It could be a single major issue, it could be multifactorial. It could be that Nintendo ran the numbers and decided a holiday launch loaded with scalpers was going to be, on net, worse than March launch with the product easy to find.
The one thing I'm convinced of is that Nintendo intentionally kept any info from partners that would cause them to wildly speculate on how Nintendo fucked up. And we're game-of-telephoning that info. So I'm leaving the door open to it being
anything.
Unless I'm mistaken, the orig Switch had its launch internally delayed from Summer 2016 to March 2017 because BOTW wasn't ready. Likewise for N64.
This is a slight tangent, but I'm gonna add a quick note here - the broad assumption is that Switch was delayed for
Breath of the Wild, but my understanding is that the gigaleak simply says "software." Inside the data-mining community, there is an assumption that "software" actually means the Switch OS. The initial run of Switch hardware was flashed with an OS version that could do little more than "boot game, and if connected to internet, update the OS."
I think this shows how much our perspective influences our view. Most fans would assume launch title when hearing "software delays" was the launch title, but the reverse engineers are so up in the OS that not only do they see things we might not look at, but are going to be biased towards seeing that as the cause.
