Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

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I honestly don't think it's coming through to people just how limited the Switch hardware really is. Sure, it is a modern machine, but the frame budget is just nothing compared to most home consoles. The Tegra X1 was a pretty decent mobile SoC... For 2015. And the one in the switch actually runs at a lower clock speed than NVIDIA was running it at before. The crowning achievement for the X1 was that it could technically boot UE4 games, but frankly as evidenced by a lot of Switch titles, it doesn't do all that well if the developers don't put a lot of effort into optimizing it. Nintendo is overall pretty good at making stuff that looks good on their own hardware, but porting games designed to run on other flagship consoles to the Nintendo flagship seems like it has been quite a challenge for the past ten years or so.

> Miracle? Eh. I'd rather pick up the PS4 copy for half the price and enjoy the game. It's not really a game designed to be played on a bus.

This is more of a nitpick but the Nintendo Switch definitely is made with Japan in mind. I am not a cultural expert on Japan by any means but it surely seems like people living near city centers have quite little space to work with, leading to folks using iPad setups instead of desktop or laptop computers. The Switch is certainly compelling in this regard, if you don't have much space for a comfortable TV setup at home. I think viewed through this lens, the contortions make a lot more sense. This also explains why Valve has been pushing very hard in Asia in general with the Steam Deck, and aggressively pricing it as well.

I just want to add to this. I'm a graphics programmer in the gaming industry and for the last few years my main focus has been performance. The games I work on are games targeting all consoles, but my main focus is largely getting the switch version to look decent and still run well.

I'm exaggerating a bit but my experience is roughly that you can throw almost anything together and it will work flawlessly on a PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Go through it and clean up the obvious unnecessary wastes of performance and it will run smoothly on PS4 and Xbox One. But Switch... getting the same thing to run on Switch generally involves lowering resolution, decreasing texture sizes, removing tons of set dressing, cutting several post process effects, and replacing a lot of shaders with cheaper alternatives which hopefully look good enough that people don't notice the difference thanks to the lower resolution.

It’s aimed at Japan in at least one way: the person you need to convince that it’s necessary to have a game console in the house is Mom. It’s why the Switch is designed for and marketed aggressively towards women and children, and why it’s a huge success.

The American marketing for the Switch is definitely not "women and children" -- they made that mistake with the Wii U and it hurt, badly.

In the US, the Switch is almost exclusively marketed towards young adults, with perhaps a lean towards men rather than women.

Or, like, children who spend much of their lives outside of home?

Switch doesn't need a TV so it can be used when parents watching TV. If TV is free, child can plug it to TV.

>honestly don't think it's coming through to people just how limited the Switch hardware really is

I honestly don't understand why say Apple doesn't stick a few buttons to something like the ipod touch in iphone 13 pro max format and call it a console, what makes porting games to the Switch harder than to the iConsole (iPhone) for example? They already have the store, the brand name, the OS and the chips now? sure the videogame market is less profitable than say removing the 3.5mm jack then selling the awful sounding earpods for 150$, but more money is more money no?

Switch gamers pay €50-70 per game, iPhone gamers pay €0-€3. This incentivises making the current kind of simplistic, low dev cost, high microtransaction potential titles, which don't rely on console controls. Given e.g. Nier being a buy-once narrative experience, it's hard to see how they would make ROI in a mobile ecosystem

Apple managed to raise the price of everything they sell compared to their competitors by raising the bar for quality. They could do this to software too.

For me seeing an iPhone game priced at $20 or more is making me more likely to try it, not less. What stops many people from playing mobile games is time and quality tolerance, not money.

Apple are largely the ones who pushed down the ASP to begin with. I think my reflection of mobile games before I gave up on the whole market was similar to you, but the platforms are pretty much happy profiting off the stream of gacha transactions more than the bursty hits of AAA games.

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