Comment by rubyn00bie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rubyn00bie | Hacker News Reader

I admire Nintendo's effort but I think they need to make a phone to really compete and they need something graphically powerful. That is to say, they need to raise prices at launch of a new device to ensure the hardware has enough of a shelf life. Spending $300 on a portable for gaming after spending twice that on a phone capable of gaming seems like a hard sell to the mass market/casual gamer.

Will this really be able to stand up against iPhones and Android devices in a year or two? I sadly don't think so... the maxwell X1 it's shipping with will be under power as soon as a device is released and woefully as soon as other device manufacturers start shipping X2 (I think that's the name) Pascal or whatever new PowerVR chipset debuts soon based devices.

I think a lot of the tech going into VR like motion controls and low latency displays will destroy some of Nintendo's technical advantage they're as no longer the only game in town with it.

Finally, while making the SDK better by using open standards I think most devs would prefer a larger market; which, both iOS and Android provide.

I've been a Nintendo fan in a big way for 25 years and want to be wrong but I worry if they don't go big in another decade they'll be in the same place as Sega. I bought a Wii U solely for Smash Bros and will buy a Switch when it's (Smash Bros) ported but I don't think most folks are quite so obsessed or willing to invest that much for one game.

Glad to eat my words in a few months, hopefully I do.

Edit: updated with reference to another GPU manufacturer. For my point it's not the exact SOC that matters it's the speed of iteration/capabilities on the near horizon.

Edit 2: Here's a year old benchmark showing how the maxwell X1 stacks up:

http://wccftech.com/snapdragon-820-benchmarks/

Edit 3: added "casual gamer" after mass market for clarity.

Power doesn't matter. Phones get slower with each passing year as more bloat is added OTA. Consoles get faster as new games exploit more and more of the power available at launch. The experience has almost always been better on consoles, and not the most powerful ones.

If it were about power we would wax nostalgic about the NeoGeo, TurboGrafx 16, and Atari Jaguar.

The Neo Geo is still popular for all famous arcade games like King of Fighters. And people still play them for competition. You can't really say the same thing for the Super Famicom and the like.

Plus "power does not matter" does not make sense. It worked for Nintendo before. The SUper Famicom was the most powerful console at the time and it sold better than the Megadrive. The N64 did not beat the playstation but it was more powerful 3D-wise but they made the wrong choice to go with cartridges then. Nevertheless the N64 sold well and had very good games too.

The started dropping the ball with the Gamecube in terms of Raw Power - it was not better than the Xbox or the PS2 or at least not significantly to make any difference. And guess what, this is when Iwata was leading the design of the console. He is at the root of "we don't care about graphics, old-gen is the best". It did not work well. Even the Wii was not so much of a success- they sold a lot of hardware but very few games per system. Most consumers bought it for Wii Sports and left it at that and most units collected dust soon within a year of purchase.

Xbox and PS2 were also sold at a loss for a long time, I don't think the xbox was breaking even on it's investment until late into the 360 lifetime. Nintendo can't compete on those terms, they aren't a wing of a huge multinational company (merely a small multi national company) that can take losses like that.

The reason for Neo Geo being more popular than SNES in competitions is probably that the Neo Geo catalog was almost all competitive simultaneous 2-player games (as they doubled as arcade games), while in the SNES most iconic games are single-player. For SNES games with the simultaneous multiplayer mode (e.g. Super Mario Kart) championships are also healthy.

In my opinion SNES and Neo Geo were, each in its style, the best consoles of all time, and in general they have aged really well, as can also be seen by the persisting popularity of their games in 2017. I think this is probably because they were the pinnacle of 2D gaming. Of course 3D bought amazing possibilities to gaming, but for example the precious artfulness and attention to detail in Last Blade II (IMO a much better game than the overrated KoFs, by the way) is something I am still yet to see in a modern fighting game. On the other hand, when I play an early 3D game like many PSX releases, I just see things that can be done much better now, which makes the game look more dated.

The Neo-Geo is truly a way to bring games you would find in an arcade home while the SNES has long single player games which don't work in an arcade setting. So it's not that surprising the Neo-Geo games are more suitable for competition than most SNES games.

I don't think that going for power is a strategy that would likely work for Nintendo. Whatever is fast now will be slow in one or two years. However, the special control scheme they have is unique and might be great for casuals just like the original Wii was. If this is great at parties with non gamers it will be a success. I personally prefer some more serious games, but what I like doesn't matter.

I like it when I my messaging app show notification when I do a presentation.

Can't wait for a sexting notification to show when I share my Phone screen to TV.

Nobody actually uses Nvidia's mobile offerings as I understand it, do they?

Their "current" mobile offerings are the Tegra K1 or the X1. The upcoming SoC is the Tegra P1.

- Tegra K1 is used in the NVIDIA Shield Tablet/TV, Nexus 9, and two Chromebooks.

- Tegra X1 is in the Google Pixel C and NVIDIA's SHIELD Android TV.

- Tegra P1 or a variant is rumored to be powering the Nintendo Switch

NVIDIA seems to have switched to targeting their Tegra series for automotive instead of mobile, where the margins can be higher.

For TK1 there's a longer list of devices on Wikipedia. The additional ones are the Jetson TK1 development board, Lenovo ThinkVision 28, Xiaomi MiPad, Snail Games OBox, UTStarcom MC8718, Google Project Tango tablet, Apalis TK1 System on Module, Fuze Tomahawk F1, JXD Singularity S192.

I have both the Shield Tablet and the Shield TV. The tablet suffers from the form factor (16:10, still don't get why) but the Shield TV is a fantastic little device.

It makes it even more crazy that both of the nVidia devices retail for under $200 but Nintendo's supposedly subsidised console costs a third more.

> Nintendo's supposedly subsidised console

Nintendo hasn't subsidized a console for years (and has been rather public about that). And Nintendo includes a full wireless controller with rechargeable batteries, a TV display dock, and a tablet charger -- none of that ships with the Shield K1 Tablet (not even a cheap USB charger). And Nintendo's Switch likely uses the faster X1 chip, not the slower K1 in the Shield Tablet.

It's not really fair to complain about Nintendo's $100 higher price over the Shield Tablet, without mentioning all extra stuff Nintendo throws in for that price that the Shield Tablet doesn't include.

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