 That guy released 2,529 days ago, 8 hours and 30 minutes as of this video's release, which means in 28 days, happy birthday, he'll be 7 years old! I know it's superfluous to even point this out, but 7 years is a long time! I'm 33 years old now, which means I was 26 when I first lined up at a Canadian EB Games to get my first grey Nintendo Switch, which by the way, I drove really far out of the way to get the grey one because I refused to get the colourful neon one? What was I, depressed? But 26? I was a child! I was a baby back then! I was barely old enough to legally drink in America! And now I'm married with a wife and kids! 2017 was a year filled with fantastic decisions. I mean, we have Firefair Slash, Jedi, Trump, Trumped only by Stickdrift. Did you know in 2017 a British surgeon admitted to branding his initials on patients' livers? Sure, but I still can't customize my home theme! It's funny, you know, the whole concept of time. 7 years divided by my entire life is only 4.5, which means I've only been alive for 4 Nintendo Switches. What am I, a baby man? Sometimes I feel really old, and then other times I realize I'm still sticky from the womb. If I had pre-ordered a baby in 2017, it would be a huge financial burden by now. I'm not burdened by these. The Switch is so old. The Switch is so old, it thinks 120 Hertz is just a lot of rental cars. The Switch launched with a measly 10 games, and only 5 of them were physical in the stores, which means your options on launch day were Zelda or hoping GameStop accepted returns. And Zelda was also on the Wii U, which means the only reason to get a Switch on launch day was to brag that your Kakariko Village ran in a glorious 20 FPS. Well, as on the Wii U, it ran on fire. Well, technically, I guess there were 6 physical games on launch day, if you were willing to import I Am Set Sooner from Japan, which I remember a lot of people were doing, probably so that their copy of Zelda didn't look lonely on the shelf, or so that when people came over they could better justify their new $400 Zelda machine. One-two Switch, Just Dance 2017, Skylanders, and Super Bomberman. Ah man, really out the gate swinging here. I remember standing in line at EB Games waiting to pick up my Switch, looking at this sad selection on the shelf and thinking to myself, am I really only going to get one game on launch day? And trying to convince myself to buy one of these absolute stinkers? Honestly, it was a pretty good strategy by Nintendo. I mean, it's the same strategy I take to dating. Set the bar real low, never promise anything you can't deliver, or else they'll never let you forget it. Sprinkle in nice surprises here or there to keep them happy, and hopefully they won't realize they actually need a new side piece to let off some steam. Oh man, Bomberman was such a disappointment. I played it for like 20 minutes before I realized the R stood for return. But I mean, one-two Switch. It was the classic Nintendo pack-in game. Kind of like Wii Sports. It showed you everything that the Joy-Cons were capable of. It was kind of fun to mess around with, but really only worth playing because it was free and came in the box. Unfortunately, there was a big mistake on launch day, and all the Game Stops and EB Games got confused, took it out of the box and tried to sell it for $50. I don't think Nintendo ever realized because it's still $50. And a lot of other people didn't realize this mistake either because it sold more copies than Bayonetta III, which is a real slap in the face because this face is Jean from Bayonetta. She also said that they Photoshopped her nose to be bigger on the cover because Nintendo really said, how can we make this game sell better? Should we make it more fun? Nah, just slap a big old schnoz on the box art. That'll get him. One-two Switch even got a sequel. Everybody One-two Switch. I heard they're calling the next one Nobody One-two Switch to better align with Sailor's Projections. It took a little while for the ball to get rolling on the Switch. I remember checking the eShop every day to see if anything new had been uploaded, and most days to begin with, there was nothing. It's not like now, where 30 games are uploaded every minute. And those are just the hand-tie ones, but it was nice back then because every new game was a big deal. I maintain to this day that indie games on the Switch helped propel the Switch to be as successful as it is now, and in turn made a lot of these indies as successful as they are now. We didn't have a virtual console library this time around. We didn't even have backwards compatibility. We were starting fresh. Even ZombieU wasn't here. It was tough times. So, believe it or not, releases like Master Blaster Zero a week after launch was a big deal. Most people had already played themselves into a Zelda coma by this point, and this was the first new game to launch on the Switch since the original lineup of titles, a charming 8-bit recreation of an NES classic, and within a few months it sold 100,000 copies on the Switch alone. Even GameStop saw the potential here for the rising success of indie games and decided to take a stab at making their own. Has been heroes. Yes, this was made by GameStop. No, they never made another game for Switch. In fact, I'm pretty sure since releasing this game, GameStop's publishing company, GameTrust, has just quietly closed down and now any links to their website just take you directly to GameStop's website. I don't mean this isn't an abomination of that. Why'd you have stupid little claps? Snake Pass was an instant classic, and you can't tell me otherwise. The concept of these wacky characters with goofy controls have become very popular over the years, like getting over it and fall guys. Snake Pass brought pretty visuals and silly gameplay to the Switch portably, and it was just so cool to slither on the go. At the time, this was one of the best-looking games on the Switch, and now, seven years later, it still is. I remember meeting a guy from Craigslist under a shady bridge somewhere in Canada to buy his copy of Lego City Undercover because he said, and I quote, it sucks. Rhyme was the first game to showcase the Switch's limitations, and that only took until May. But once Stardew Valley and Hollow Knight and Overcooked and Skyrim and Celeste and Enter the Gungeon and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Not You and Mario Odyssey, and so many other great games hit the Switch in that first year, it was already set in stone that the Switch was going to be a huge success. Outselling the Wii U in its first year alone at 30 million, and where we stand today is 132 Nintendo Switches sold. That's like one for every living Australian person, not counting the kangaroos, obviously. By the end of 2017, games like Steamworld Dig 2 sold 10 times more on the Switch than Steam. Nintendo really said, hey Gabe, I ain't just suck this deck. By the holidays, the Switch had solidified itself as a hit. It was the number one toy that Christmas. Well, that and Vingolings, which I've never liked the name of that. Sounds like something high schoolers do behind the shed. It's crazy to look back at it now. The amount of people who knew for sure the Switch was going to fail. Trying to explain to somebody now that isn't aware of what it was like back then, that most people expected about as much out of Nintendo as the next Call of Duty. It's like trying to convince someone that crocs are actually really cool and they don't at all make it look like you might need help crossing the road. Nintendo was down and out during the Wii U era. They couldn't sell water to a fish. And now you look at the list of best-selling games of all time ever and Nintendo are there with multiple entries with the Switch. Bam, Zelda. Boom, Mario Kart. Animal Crossing with 44 million copies sold. That's one in every three people that own a Switch have Animal Crossing. Who said COVID was good for nothing? Again, I like to think that Indies played a big part in that, but you can also look at the huge dramatic shift in marketing. Throughout the Wii U era, there was such a heavy focus on kids. Well, kids and Steve from Stranger Things. Hi, bud! I wasn't a kid when the Wii U came out. I was 22 years old. I was already old enough to know that life had no purpose and I was drowning in existential dread. Where was my representation? What'd that even look like? It would just be a sad man on his couch alone playing Color Splash, which to be fair is really the only way to play Color Splash. You compare that to the Switch's marketing and there's not a snot-nosed little brat anywhere to be seen. It's all adults. Heck, I mean, this guy from the tears of the Kingdom commercial is like a mid-40s businessman. He's in a suit and tie. In fact, I'm pretty sure the implication here is that he's depressed and the only thing that keeps him going is the new Zelda. Nintendo finally understands me. Nintendo understood their audience better this time around because they understood us. I was a big advocate for the Wii U back in the day, but I saw its flaws. I made videos about it back then, like games worth buying or if the Wii U itself was even worth buying. I did that purely because I enjoyed playing the first-party games on it. So when the Switch came out, I just started making videos about that instead. It was the new Nintendo thing. What else was I gonna do? Because all ye had such little faith, there was so few of us making videos about the Switch back then. Months later, when people started to realize that, hey, maybe this thing isn't the new Super Duper Wii U Switch 2. And I might actually want to grab one of these things and they start looking up videos about games worth buying on the Switch or just about the Switch in general. Guess whose videos were there? Arlo's! Well, and mine. Arlo's and mine. I'm not just glad the Switch was a huge success because it makes me right, or even because I'm a big Nintendo fan, but because it gave me a whole career. Nintendo have always had a passion for video games. Alongside that, they've also had a passion for players being able to play their games wherever they want, which is why we've always had Nintendo handhelds alongside Nintendo's home consoles. But their handhelds obviously had their limitation. You couldn't put Ocarina of Time on a Game Boy in 1998. Scientists were dumb idiots back then. You remember Shrek Ketchup? So Nintendo's always had these two platforms, the portable and the at-home. But as soon as the scientists got smart, and we reached a point where those two worlds could come together and the lines didn't have to be so blurred anymore, Nintendo jumped on it. And from 2017 onwards, if you wanted to play Nintendo, either at home or on the go, your only option was the Switch. Of course, it was going to do really well. It definitely was not all successes though. Throughout the Switch's run, we've seen Nintendo try and fail at many things, like thinking they could get away with charging us more than a normal video game's worth of money for cardboard. To be fair though, that cardboard did have some unique uses. Like, I can't remember the last time paper made me vomit. Like, did you ever try playing Zelda and VR? What am I saying? No one bought this. Ultimately, it was a very expensive product that had barely any replayability and whatever fun was there was pretty short-lived. Another thing, the game cartridges that Nintendo offer, they come in several sizes, all the way from one gig to a whopping 64 gigabytes. I mean, that's just enough to fit one dinosaur from Ark. The biggest issue with that is that the larger cart sizes cost the developers a lot of money. After speaking with several dev teams over the years, I've heard anything between 20 to $30 in production costs to get a 64 gigabyte card for your game. That's half your profits from a $60 game going straight to Nintendo's greedy, grubby little pocket. And that's assuming your game is $60. If your game is 30, it's a wash. It's not even worth doing. That's why over the years, we've seen so many of these, the download code in box effect. This sign on a Nintendo box turns gamers off quicker than baby talk, which is why I've also seen developers do this nifty little trick where they'll buy the one gigabyte little bitty baby card and they'll stick that in the box and they'll put just the tiniest little fraction of their game on the actual card, essentially just the title screen. And then when you go to boot up the game, it'll download the rest of it at launch. You're buying nothing. You're essentially buying it digital, but you get to hold it for a second. Ooh, ha. Nintendo also never really figured out their online social infrastructure, either. I'm not sure if at some point they decided to, ah, who needs to talk to people. Don't mind the fact we went through a whole pandemic and people were playing online. Just get a Motorola flip and download our app. I know it doesn't work this way, but I just had this really funny image of a guy downloading the app and playing Splatoon Online and just hardcore raging losing his tits during a game. But nobody else has the app so no one can hear him. He's just screaming into an empty void. I will say that throughout the Switch's seven-year reign, it didn't have much competition for most of it. I mean, when the Switch released, Xbox fans were already in the middle of a drought of games so dry that Microsoft bought up like a bazillion studios just so that now, almost a whole decade later, the drought is still as dry as the Sahara Desert. I guess they just released Starfield to pour salt into the dehydrated wound and no offense, Xbox, but Nintendo have really only been squaring up against Sony this entire time. The PlayStation 5 has done a really great job at releasing quality banger titles at a steady rate, but gotta be honest, it does not hold a candle to what Nintendo has created. These are the first-party exclusive games currently on PlayStation 5. It's, like, 12. I don't know, some of the great games aren't here because they ended up going to PC. But if we look at Nintendo Switch's exclusive games right now... Jesus Christ! I can't count that, Minis. I'm a YouTuber. But it's not just the amount of games that Nintendo has over its competition, it's the amount of genres. Sony really specializes in third-person over-the-shoulder action games. Demon's Souls, Pharma Fantasy VII, Horizon, God of War, they're all fantastic groundbreaking experiences, but they're also all very familiar. Similiar. Similar at their core. I'm not just talking about their cover art. It's like someone standing on a mountain. I'm not just trying to be facetious either. I mean, take a look at any first-party Sony game. It's most likely going to be a gritty over-the-shoulder action game, and then either a shooter, a samurai game, or have zombies, or in many cases, all three. But then you load up that Nintendo and you've got... Eraser, a fighter, an FPS, hack and slash, platformers, party games, micro mini games, melatonin, strategy RPGs, fitness, build-it-your-damn-self games. A million enemies at once, good luck. But also this game has great story and cutscenes for no reason. 47 different Kirby games. The best pissing open-world RPG you've ever seen. In fact, that we got two of them. 2D Metroidvanias, which is kind of weird to call this game a Metroidvania. Nintendo's own over-the-shoulder shooter. You're a kid now. You're a squid now game. There's like two good Xenoblades on this thing. Bucket loads of exclusive indie games, whatever the f**k arms were supposed to be. The Weaches Mansion 3, baby. Every Zelda game except the best two for some reason. XCOM style Mario, who even asked for that? The Pokemon games are here for better or worse. Pretty much for the worst, to be honest at this point. An animal crossing. An adorable island life sim that took the pandemic by storm. And to be honest, Nintendo's not even done. Thousand-year door is coming this year. Peach is getting a weird and wacky wonderful game. I swear to God, if Metroid Prime 4 releases after I'm dead, oh, I'm gonna be so annoyed. The scatterspray of having a game in every genre is insane enough. But the fact that so many of these games are considered the best game in its genre. The best kart racer, the best open-world RPG, the best platformers, the best fighting game, the best collection of 51 worldwide classics. When you really only have to compete with one other platform and your platform can offer something for literally anybody, it's no wonder why the Nintendo Switch is one of the best-selling consoles of all time. But now, it's 2024, baby. Hand-held consoles have exploded in the market recently. Sometimes, literally. Many companies realized they could create powerful hand-held PCs to put in your hands and allow you to play any of your PC games all in one place. You know, like the Aeonio, the Aeonio Air, the Aeonio Air Pro, the Aeonio Next, the Aeonio Next Pro, the Aeonio 2, the Aeonio Goon, the Aeonio Pocket Air, the Aeonio 1s, the Aeonio 2s, and the Aeonio Geek 1s. And that was all in the span of three years. Aeonio, slow down. The console market is getting absolutely flooded. It is out of control, but the king of them all right now is very clearly the Steam Deck. It's also the most affordable. Nintendo is starting to have competition. I mean, maybe not with the games, but certainly with the hardware. I mean, Valve went ahead and called that the Steam Deck OLED, so they're not even hiding what they're doing. I doubt that old Dougie and the rest of the game are really concerned at all about any of that over there at Nintendo HQ, and I am really excited to see what they do next. How does Nintendo plan to combat this expanding and ever-growing realm of handhelds? Can they recreate the success of the Nintendo Switch? Or will history repeat itself as it often does for Nintendo? They create a success, then they make a failure. But then they create a success, and then they make a failure. Right now we have a success, so as long as they don't...