EmployeeAMillion
Season 12 Time!
There hasn't been an official topic for this discussion, but it's a subject of debate among Nintendo fans.
There has always been confusion as to the generations of certain consoles. There are the obvious ones like "NES is Generation 3" and "PlayStation is Generation 5", but there are some that are harder to pinpoint.
For example, the Game and Watch series of handhelds, if you even classify them as video games in the modern sense, started in 1980 (in the middle of Generation 2) and ended in 1991 (when Generation 4 was getting off the ground). Likewise, the HyperScan came and went within a year of the PS3 and Wii's release, but didn't live to see the GameCube exist the market.
Now here we are with another conundrum. What exactly is the Nintendo Switch? It has hardware similar to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 (Generation 8), but it's come out much later and has more sophisticated features like the HD Rumble and the Off TV-Play. What makes this even more confusing is Nintendo's mixed answers on whether or not it's a true successor to the Wii U, their 8th Generation console. There's also the question as to when this console is going to be replaced for a proposed 10th Gen console (if we're looking at a lifespan of 6-7 years, it'll probably come around 2023-2024) and given Sony and Microsoft want to keep their consoles around for longer, I'd say their future offerings would come out in the early 2020s as well.
I personally believe that, until further notice, we should refer to it as Generation 8.5, like how some consoles from the early 90s like the Atari Jaguar and 3DO weren't exactly 4th Gen but didn't last far into the 5th Gen.
Then again, this could be another example of Nintendo straying away from stereotypes and focusing on a new way to look at games.
There has always been confusion as to the generations of certain consoles. There are the obvious ones like "NES is Generation 3" and "PlayStation is Generation 5", but there are some that are harder to pinpoint.
For example, the Game and Watch series of handhelds, if you even classify them as video games in the modern sense, started in 1980 (in the middle of Generation 2) and ended in 1991 (when Generation 4 was getting off the ground). Likewise, the HyperScan came and went within a year of the PS3 and Wii's release, but didn't live to see the GameCube exist the market.
Now here we are with another conundrum. What exactly is the Nintendo Switch? It has hardware similar to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 (Generation 8), but it's come out much later and has more sophisticated features like the HD Rumble and the Off TV-Play. What makes this even more confusing is Nintendo's mixed answers on whether or not it's a true successor to the Wii U, their 8th Generation console. There's also the question as to when this console is going to be replaced for a proposed 10th Gen console (if we're looking at a lifespan of 6-7 years, it'll probably come around 2023-2024) and given Sony and Microsoft want to keep their consoles around for longer, I'd say their future offerings would come out in the early 2020s as well.
I personally believe that, until further notice, we should refer to it as Generation 8.5, like how some consoles from the early 90s like the Atari Jaguar and 3DO weren't exactly 4th Gen but didn't last far into the 5th Gen.
Then again, this could be another example of Nintendo straying away from stereotypes and focusing on a new way to look at games.