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Comment by Operyl | Hacker News Reader

While the article is most definitely talking about their hardware, I can't help but feel they probably take a similar approach to their software. Switch's OS is basically a fork of their 3DS OS, with much more thought put into play about security (the 3DS was swiss cheese). Of course, there were many bugs to be found (using a massively out of date webkit at launch, they outsourced this to some vendor). But after all these years, online play in their first party games is still just so .. atrocious. Ugh.

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That also has to do with the state of software in Japan. For a very long time, being a software developer was seen as much less prestigious than being an electronic engineeer and a bit more akin to a secretary that codes up the requirements...

So the best and the brightest did not tend to go into software and the typical state of software engineering in a lot of big japanese companies was extremely bad... It's getting better but it's still not great.

Nintendo also has a tendency to outsource a lot of their software development (IIRC the SDK for the wii and the DS was outsourced to intelligent systems who themselves then outsourced part of it)

This is of course a generalization as things goes and there are great things coming out of Japan (hello Ruby!) but having lived there, there was a marked difference between the software engineering culture in Japan and the one I saw in the US and Europe, with Japan being easily a decade or more behind.

Is this why software developers are paid peanuts in Japan?

Well, yes, it's not valued as a profession. When I moved to Japan as a recent grad, I was paid 50% of what I would have been paid back in France...

Do you think part of the issue is that computerization of records lagged due to the difficulty of encoding Japanese? When I lived there in the mid-00s, everything was still done on paper AFAICT. By then Unicode sort of existed but was still niche.

On top of that, programming is done in English, which just adds cognitive burden. You could make a Japanese programming language, but those haven't gone anywhere, I think in part because you'd need to convert the characters to kanji as you type and that would take longer than just typing in Roman letters.

Yes but not really.

The “encoding problem” for Asian languages is real, but it goes back earlier than that, as it emerged with typewriters. See Thomas Mullaney’s “A history of the Chinese typewriter”, and Nanette Gottlieb’s “Word Processing Technology in Japan” for more. By the late 90s/00s it wasn’t a significant primary factor (that is if it was a factor, it was due to cultural inertia, and not lack of access to technology itself).

I think the problem here is looked at backwards. It’s not that Japan sucks at software - it’s that the US/North America got extremely good at software in the last 20 years (by a combination of factors that feed into each other, as always: the best research labs are in the US, the tools are built in the US, the companies that make use of them for competitive advantage are in the US, the economic context most favorable to founding such companies is in the US, etc). The rest of the world is catching up, but the gap is still visible.

I worked for Namco Bandai's American branch for a few years around 2006. The Japanese developers could apply to work in America for the cultural experience, IIRC the ones I met told me they were paid about $30000 USA in Japan and got a temporary bump in salary to $75000 or so for cost of living adjustment and a company car and apartment (this was in Santa Clara, CA). I think they were all extremely good, competent programmers and we American programmers were making about double what they were making, our contractors were making I think triple what they made. One of the Japanese guys coding anonymously in the corner worked on several of the Namco cabinet video games like Dig Dug back in the day.

I hope this isn’t too off topic but my son and I spent a lot of hours bonding over the game “Tank Tank Tank”. If by some small chance you were part of that project, thank you.

Sorry that was after my time, may have been entirely Namco Bandai Japan production.

Strange, any insight on what the perception is of game programmers in Japan? I feel like a lot of the great Switch games are made by Nintendo, it would seem they'd be dying for good developers to continue developing first party titles.

Isn't it more a fork of android with some loose inheritance from 3DS?

But anyway, the problems of software and online-service in japan are old, very old. To some degree it originates in their late adaption of PCs with broader parts of society, to some other degree their early adaption of online-services in the age of featurephones including all the horrible patterns.

Japans society developed quite different in those areas, and you see it all the time with their software, culture and decisions. Nintendo is not really special there.

Nope. It contains AOSP code (which started the rumor mill that it was Android) but it was not. It also contains some code from FreeBSD, which similarly sparked the rumor that it was FreeBSD, but alas it isn't. I spent a good amount of time in the early Switch days picking apart the operating system.

Here's a good wiki with a ton of information on the kernel/os: https://switchbrew.org/wiki/Main_Page

EDIT: Here's some AOSP usage: https://switchbrew.org/wiki/Nvnflinger_services https://switchbrew.org/wiki/Display_services and apparently some AAC codec code.

Even Sony's offering in that regard has been playing catch up to Xbox Live. PSN on PS4 has reached feature parity with Xbox Live on the 360, but it sure doesn't compete in important areas like actually working, download speeds, and navigating the menus in a reasonable time. Not sure what Live on Xbox One is like as I didn't get a Xbox this generation.

Meanwhile Nintendo still hasn't caught up with Xbox Live from the original Xbox.

I would say Microsoft took a big step back with live on Xbox One. Very unreliable service with regards to communication in parties and joining games via invitation. I don’t think you can say today that Microsoft has better online services than Sony.

"Meanwhile Nintendo still hasn't caught up with Xbox Live from the original Xbox."

I can't help but think that this is intentional from Nintendo. There are many many online and local wireless features on the Wii/ and 3/DS that are no longer present on the Switch. They seems to start over with every platform. I get the impression though that Nintendo doesn't want communication features that are not "safe" for younger players. It is really frustrating though, especially with stay-at-home, that my kids can't communicate with friends on their gaming platform. The Wii U was a step in the right direction and they scrapped that.

I don't know if I would hold it against any company for not being on par with Microsoft for rolling out a massive cloud service. Microsoft has been designing for massive, globally distributed services for enterprises forever, even before Azure and O365.

They made the right decision. Communication in online gaming is poison and only gets worse and worse over time. Keep your kids off of it as much as you can.

In general I agree, though every gaming community is a bit different. Personally I'm keeping my kids off public online communication in particular, but I do want them to have that communication option with IRL friends and family when they go online.

I'm really surprised they don't use a light weight Linux or something as a base. Nintendos OSes have been pretty terrible. I remember the 3DS e-store being especially painful to use and that's how they're supposed to make money off you. All the online features always feels like my 1st gen Kindle.

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