Let me know when your next gamejolt masterpiece comes out, will you? See you around.
Ad hominems are all well and good, but they don't hold much water when you've never released a game, RHC :^)
Anyway, I don't have anything more to say on the whole YoYo/Nintendo thing, because at this point it's just speculation. But I do want to address one thing:
the Switch is a Nintendo handheld. These things always dominate the market, and the Switch has the added benefit of running in the living room.
Let me break this down and explain why I think the Switch is a "niche" product. It's actually for the exact reason you described: it straddles two markets, handheld and console. This is how they describe it themselves:
The mobility of a handheld is now added to the power of a home gaming system
Now on the surface this seems like a clever idea, and while in terms of hardware that may be the case, it actually makes it much more difficult to market. You see the handheld market is focused around casual, portable gaming. Nintendo's handhelds have dominated the market so far because they're easily carried and they're
standardised. But the Switch is much larger than the DS, tricker to travel with and has multiple pieces. And since Nintendo is primarily advertising the Switch as a console, albeit one which is portable, it's a tricky sell to the handheld market.
But console gamers are used to long campaigns, powerful hardware and, obviously
, staying still. Many are going to be turned off by the whole "portable" angle. This leaves developers with a problem: develop games that are easily carried around in a backpack, which can be started and quit quickly like a mobile or handheld game can? Or make games which are designed for long, stationary periods of play? You couldn't have
Flappy Bird on the PS4 and you couldn't have
Dark Souls on a phone. It's obviously not that hard to move past this problem, but it's still a design obstacle for new development. And a design obstacle means a harder sell.
See, a market for this thing doesn't exist yet. That's the problem. Nintendo is counting on a merge of their two main existing markets - handheld and console - but 1 + 1 doesn't always equal 2 in the marketing world. The iPhone created a new market when it was released because it filled a gap people didn't know they needed - now we have smartphones. The iPad did the same because it let people do proper work in a more portable environment. But it remains to be seen whether the Switch will do the same, because right now both the portable and console gaming markets are functioning just fine, mostly independently of each other.
In a nutshell, it's gimmicky. It's the same problem the WiiU had - "the new controller is all very well and good, but what's the point?". Any innovation that challenges an existing system needs to fill that device-we-didn't-know-we-wanted criteria, like the iPhone. There were few cases where the Wii U's controller was truly used to its potential, but mostly it actually
got in the way of development. The Switch is an easier pitch, because it has more standard controls, but we just don't know yet if there's an audience for this portable-console hybrid thing. Remember, most of the hype is coming from
established Nintendo customers, but if they want to really muscle in on the console market (and not just in the casual gaming sense), they'll have to expand their reach.