Launch Switch with Breath of the Wild and like nothing else for the next eight to nine months, and it would have crashed and burned. We tend to aggrandize killer apps even when we’ve seen the limits of their appeal. Nintendo 64 launched with Super Mario 64, arguably the most influential 3D platformer of all time. It helped, just like Ocarina of Time helped, but a big seller here and there just isn’t enough. Switch is doing as well as it is because everything about the console is good-enough-for-now (looking at you, Nintendo Switch Online) to amazing, notably its gimmick is easy to grasp, and it had a steady roll out of good to great games. Take away the consistent releases and we may have seen 3DS’s first year again. Not beyond saving, but Nintendo would be in a tough spot. Replace Breath of the Wild and Odyssey with paint-by-number sequels and leave the rest of the lineup the same, Switch probably still sells pretty well.
Launch Wii U with Breath of the Wild and Nintendo Land then like nothing else for eight months, and it would still crash and burn because everything else about the console was mediocre to bad at launch. It didn’t do one thing excellently. Like I said in a previous post, “selling a $300+ console to play a poorly explained mini-game collection and a by-the-numbers 2D Mario game was always going to be an uphill battle.” That doesn’t change with a single killer app. It’d still be an uphill battle, just slightly less steep. The point is to avoid an uphill battle to begin with. With Switch, Nintendo finally did that.