[Keyframe]

You buy Nintendo for Nintendo games, as in first-party games. Everything else is just a plus. That has been the case since I'd say N64 days. Before that it was still a toss up, especially with Sega. After that, Nintendo drifted wholly into its own world, supporting its own worldview, and others were competing for third party titles and using specs in the marketing as if it mattered - which it did if same game was available on multiple target platforms and you were buying for that.

[bluefirebrand]

> You buy Nintendo for Nintendo games, as in first-party games

There are still Nintendo console exclusive third-party games, too. They often don't stay exclusive if they are successful enough, but they do happen

But largely you are correct

The truly impressive part is just how large the First Party Nintendo ecosystem is. They have a ton of IPs that you can only get on Nintendo systems. Pokemon alone is the most valuable franchise in the world

[hedora]

I’d argue their last two custom hardware competitors were xbox 360 arcade (the indie store) and cell phone games.

(I’m counting competitors as “the game mechanics are more important than production values”)

In a massive self-own, Microsoft killed arcade at xbone launch (worst. console. ever.), and cell phone games were ruined by pay to win (most games) and lack of first party physical controllers (the other games, e.g., Apple Arcade).

These days, it’s just steam, abandonware and nintendo. I used to pay for nintendo online to get the emulation games, but the library kind of sucked, and (more importantly) if you pay for it, there’s no way to turn off in-game ads for online play in stuff like mario, making the entire system inappropriate for kids.

I’m curious to see how the switch 2 does. The lock screen on our switch is wall-to-wall ads for it, but nothing looks compelling so far. The kids are more excited about an old switch 1 port of a wii game...

[Keyframe]

Technically there are also second-party games, which are independent companies exclusive to them like those from HAL Laboratory (Kirby), Intelligent Systems (Metroid), Game Freak (Pokemon).. maybe things have changed, but yeah.