I didn't say it had anything to do with age, though.
We saw the Wii U flop even though the Wii was a runaway success. The 3DS struggled to make much of a splash for a while even though it was literally just a DS but better. Before that, the N64 sold miserably compared to the PS1, even though the SNES was the most popular platform of its generation.
I'd say that's more than enough evidence to suggest that Nintendo's audience doesn't have as much brand loyalty compared to the competition. This could easily be because a lot of people see Nintendo as a supplementary option, rather than having that mutual exclusivity that they have with either a PlayStation or an Xbox, they'll buy a Nintendo system in addition to whichever other platform they have, but only if it provides them with a significant enough reason to buy it.
You claimed that Nintendo's audience is "casual family", whereas the Playstation and Xbox audience is "casual adult". That clearly implies that Nintendo's demographics would skew more heavily towards children, which isn't supported by the data. I also don't agree that any of the examples you provide here constitute evidence that Nintendo doesn't have as much brand loyalty. In all cases there were a wide variety of factors at play which have been discussed ad nauseam, and there are readily available counter examples in the form of Xbox One and PS Vita.
In any case, this is getting quite off topic for a hardware speculation thread, so I'll leave it at that.
Any receipts for this? Especially the 'limited funds for marketing' is both hilariously implausible and are you suggesting that Nintendo allowed that Eurogamer article as cheap marketing? A newspiece that at most a few thousand people have actually read?
For consistency, I'll continue using Eurogamer/Digital Foundry reporting from here.
Sony and especially Microsoft have even more 'infinite money and popularity', yet PS5 + XBox Series X specs were already accurately reported on between
Dec '19 and
March '20 . If we accept that both PS4 and Switch were/are popular, successful consoles with direct successors lined up by the manufacturers, this completely diverging reporting only makes sense if Switch 2 is releasing H1 2024 at the earliest, subject to some credible reporting emerging in the next few weeks.
This is now more than 10 years ago, but in
April '11 , also more than 12 months before release, Wii U was also accurately foreshadowed on.
The Nvidia leak of
Mar '22 got a segment on DF Direct Weekly, but I straight up do not believe that this is equivalent to the preceding examples. For one, the source is different (Nvidia being hacked != specs leaked by game developers) and the clocks within that leak and the chip size don't wash as seen throughout this thread.
In conclusion, I doubt that this 'T239' device is releasing this year. Although I offer no hints/proofs beyond the historic pattern of reporting by credible news sources, I propose that this is still ample justification for my claim. If T239-based Switch 2 does release in H2 2023 I will be over the moon personally and you can all laugh at me. I won't much care since, again, I'll look forward to playing on exciting new hardware!
There's a good reason why we would expect specs for Nintendo's recent consoles to be either less likely to leak or leak later than Sony and Microsoft's hardware, which is simply that fewer people need to know them. Most major third party games are made with either PS5 or XBSX as the primary platform. If a developer started a project in 2017, then it was likely targeting PS5 as the primary platform, and the developers would have needed to know as much about the hardware as they could as early as they could in order to scope the game out, develop the game engine, create assets and soforth. By the time the specs leaked almost every third party in the industry would have been working on a PS5/XBSX game.
Nintendo is in a much better position with third parties than they were, but the number of games made with Switch as the primary platform is still comparatively tiny. There have certainly been a few (Mario+Rabbids, Octopath Traveller, MH:Rise off the top of my head), but for each of them there were probably 10 games built around the PS4, with bigger teams to boot. Switch received many ports as well, and I'm sure that will continue with [redacted], but these were often ported after the fact, in relatively short time periods with small teams, and often outsourced to specialised port studios.
If we're going with detailed specification leaks from developers, then we do see this happening much later for Nintendo's last couple of consoles than Sony and Microsoft's. As you say, full detailed specs for PS5/XBSX were known around 8-11 months before launch. In the case of the Switch, Eurogamer published
this article 8 months before Switch's release, which revealed that they would be using a Nvidia Tegra chip, but didn't give any detailed specs. In fact, although they identify the Tegra X1 as being used in dev kits, they actually spend time in the article speculating that its a placeholder for another chip such as the Tegra X2, so clearly they hadn't received nearly as much detail from developers at this stage as they had for PS5/XBSX at a similar time-frame. Actual specs weren't leaked until
just 3 months before launch, and even then clock speeds were a bit off compared to what the Switch launched with.
When it comes to the Wii U, there were many fundamental specifications, including the number of shader cores, that weren't known until
after the console was launched. The Eurogamer article you link to contains vague references to R700-era GPUs being used in dev kits, but no detailed specs at all. A developer leak of the actual hardware specs never happened. Details were so sparse that for months after Wii U released we were
poring over die photos to try to figure out basic specifications.
That's not to say that we shouldn't expect developer leaks to occur in the run-up to launch, but we shouldn't be using the timelines of Sony and MS console leaks as a guide for when to expect them.
en.wikipedia.org
