Between Panic and Teenage Engineering I actually have faith in this being a worthwhile endeavor. From the face of it I would expect this to go the way of the Ouya, but with those two at the helm it could actually be something cool. It's a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stagnant casual mobile gaming space.
Do people consider the switch a mobile platform? I mean it sort of is but... It's really a console. Depends how you define mobile, if mobile === carry in your pocket it's not. If mobile === independent from a TV then yes.
In London, it does not appear to be treated like something mobile – but in Tokyo it certainly is. You will see kids – mainly boys – huddle together around Switch screens or playing using the wireless wherever you go in suburban Tokyo.
It’s very common for high school kids (in America) to take their switch from class to class and play during free periods. A lot of people take their switch everywhere in their bag and just prop it up when they want to play a quick game of smash with friends.
So yes, I would definitely consider the switch mobile
It doesn’t have the same goals as the Ouya. The Ouya wanted to be the next big thing, it wanted to be a platform. This wants to be a nice, fun, arty thing and definitely not be a platform. I don’t think it makes much sense to compare the two.
A possible point of comparison for me would be Fujifilm’s very successful line of Instax instant cameras. They are similar to other cameras (phone, compact, DSLR, mirrorless) in that they take photos but framing them as a competitor to other cameras doesn’t make much sense.
Taking photos with them is much more expensive (given that nobody will give up their phone for an Instax camera and practically all phones today will take better photos than Instax cameras, just purely from a technical point of view, ignoring aesthetic preferences) and the photos you do take are just much more impractical than digital photos. But that doesn’t matter at all since all of that is not the point of Instax cameras.
In the gaming space the biggest actual competitor is still probably Nintendo, but not with their “normal” Games, more with their “weird” experiments like Nintendo Labo. I could actually imagine someone deciding between Labo and this.
