Nintendo demoed Switch 2 to developers at Gamescom
eurogamer.net
eurogamer.net
Edit: I see there are a lot of replies already on my comment but I need to add more thoughts to it, I have the feeling that if Nintendo is going to release a better tablet with complete backward compatibility with the Switch, most developers will continue to develop for the original console instead of developing games for the new hardware as the Switch has sold >120mln of consoles, this is good for the consumer but it's probably not what Nintendo would want if their new generation console is seen as a "New 3ds" (there are only a dozen of games that run exclusively on this console, all the others run on the original hardware).
That would mean Nvidia SoC. The first gen Switch choose Nvidia because they were cheap, and Nvidia were despite to get their SoC into some use.
With today's Nvidia I am just worried Nintendo isn't getting any decent deals.
Reimplementing NVN is a big lift so NVidia certainly has the inside track but it's probably enough of a threat that Nintendo has some negotiating power.
Nintendo is scummy AF advertising/marketing to children and their constant abuse of fans for playing recreationally with IP.
Nintendo is probably a negative externality given their marketing to children. To this day, I still have a mental illness of obsession to their games, and I hate playing them.
I'll join in on the bashing of bad companies:
I'll take Nintendo over Mercenary companies. Or Nintendo over Theranos!
I'll take Nintendo over that one healthcare clinic that was fraud billing medicare.
This thread is about Nintendo though, not mobile gaming.
Funny enough, they somehow managed to make Splatoon 3 feel more like a FOMO-infested skinner box than most modern live service games I've tried, despite it having no microtransactions.
This is really not my experience. To my eye they don't seem to be engaged in the majority of the awful practices around marketing that are pervasive in tech today.
As for the "constant abuse of fans" thing - is Nintendo really that different from any other company who has to protect their IP in this arena? There have definitely been frustrating situations around fan games and the like, but the argument I've always seen (which makes sense) is that they pretty much have to enforce copyright zealously to prevent loss of control of their brands.
Who’s to say, that if you allow one fan game, some pedophile won’t make their own fan game? And kids won’t start sending messages about how they appreciate his game?
There isn’t one. Stop it before it can happen.
What if North Korea starts using Nintendo characters to create a religion and uses it to overthrow governments?!?!
Well since North Korea isn't bound by IP laws, its best to dissolve Nintendo to keep everyone safe.
Hey, if you like Nintendo, you support North Korean Indoctrination.
Or I have a different idea, what if a 12 year old kid learned programming to make a pokemon knockoff and donated the money to curing cancer.
I like my hypotheticals more than yours. Which do you like?
You literally arent their target demographic. Children too young to understand marketing are.
Unless you are a kid, you wouldn't be targeted.
It might well be the case that I'm enough a firewall that their sinister marketing isn't making it into my home, but I haven't personally seen it. I'd be interested to hear more specific examples of what you mean.
I'm not claiming they're not doing anything wrong, just that it's not consistent with my own experience of Nintendo. Their console seems to be more respectful of my kids than most other platforms (although the fact that there's not a good way to block the Youtube app is a glaring omission - you can password protect the eShop and prevent it from making it onto their device in the first place, but there should really be a way to block a specific application, and nothing I've tried in their parental controls has worked).
Where's the marketing in what I've said? They make good games. Their console isn't full of ads or micro transactions or other bullshit. They made good games when I was a kid and they still do now. The console is more family friendly than the other two big ones.
Do they market to kids? Of course. They make big budget kids movies. They sell t shirts and posters and toys. But I'm just not seeing what's so sinister here.
Any addiction is bad, but unless the "item" is pushed in malice (like, say, tobacco), I would not consider that to be the fault of the creator. Unlike others, they are not actively (or at least only minimally) pushing gambling, gacha games, loot-boxes, "season-passes" and other abusive psychological tricks as their core strategy (the concept of a game is in itself not malicious or bad). So in that sense, I consider them a positive and rather responsible game company.
The only really negative comment I have for Nintendo (other than just generally wanting better stuff), is that their use of DMCA and other IP protection is completely absurd.
Blame and opinions aside, I hope you find a way through your illness.
Its not a productivity thing, it's a manipulation thing. Zelda games have been getting worse since Wind Waker, yet we continue to play them. They arent fun, we are just under the control of Nintendo.
Chatgpt said we do this because of FOMO and Nostalgia.
Sure, wind waker is a good game, but I had much more fun playing BotW on master mode. I have yet to finish TotK, so we'll have that one ends up comparing.
So say what you want, it won't change that I'm having voluntary fun playing these games over here.
The current-gen Switch is kinda crazy underpowered. There's plenty of room for Nvidia to improve on the 20/16nm TSMC process used in the original, as well as adding better acceleration for modern features like DLSS, ML and ray tracing. It would still be an enormous performance leap even if they both phone it in and fab the console on cheap-as-chips TSMC 7nm.
I hope none of this makes it into the next Switch. It's already enough that these things are completely ruining PC game performance, I don't want to buy a console in 2023 that can only play games at 480p upscaled.
The point of naming those technologies was mostly just to spitball different things Nintendo and Nvidia might be interested in. It's hard to say what they focus on for the next generation.
I know, and those games look awful unless you're playing them on a tiny screen or sitting far away from it. 1080p screens were standard 10+ years ago, and rendering games natively at that resolution and 60fps was easily done on any decent PC of the time, even if sometimes you sometimes had to turn down the quality settings a bit.
An entire decade later, I think it's unacceptable to release games that cannot be played at native 1080p 60fps on current gen hardware. DLSS & co. are simply being used as excuses by developers to not properly optimize their games (in some cases, releasing games that struggle to run on the best available hardware, see Starfield), and they will never look as good as native resolution.
A more technical reason for this was that this prevented the need to implement preemptive multitasking in the microkernel OS, which would have been very slow by comparison. (Yes, the Switch OS uses cooperative multitasking for itself, but with sandboxing for unruly games.)
Of course, running anything web-related on one ARM CPU core from 2015 is going to suck, regardless of the technical rationale.
It doesn't make sense to be launching these big titles a year before the new console if you only have a year to buy/play them before they sell you a new console that can't play it. Nintendo historically hasn't worked like that.
My guess is it'll be backwards compatible like the jump from DS to 3DS, where the cartridge slot fits the last gen system's games and has the same contacts, but the new gen cartridges are shaped with some extra protrusion of plastic that stops you from shoving them into the last gen system.
Edit: Sorry, I misread your comment. :|
Tears of the Kingdom already had its launch and sold a TON of copies. If the new console isn't backwards compatible, they either are going to have to resell it to you which is a big ask, or just not have a new Zelda game available to play on their new system for another 6-7 years, which is not likely.
N64, good sales, but not great. NES and SNES were better.
GameCube, total meltdown (for the time).
Wii, excellent sales.
Wii U, total meltdown.
Switch, excellent sales.
Switch 2, anything but a meltdown.
But if you are Nintendo, the Wii and the Switch are about equally successful phenomenons. That didn’t save them from the Wii U; and the success of the Switch certainly won’t save them from a Switch 2 implosion. Even if the games are good (like the Wii U launching with Mario Kart 8, now the bestselling Switch title.)
It wasn't a launch title, it came like a year and a half after the Wii U's launch. And even though it was pretty good, it was an exception. The Wii U really didn't have much in terms of killer apps. Nintendo was releasing some very bland stuff in the early-to-mid 2010s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxvmrmOHRsU
Plus they botched the marketing horribly between the name "Wii U" and never showing the console itself, only the gamepad, making many consumers believe it was just a Wii accessory they didn't want.
Plus, our news media is totally going to report a single pedophile incident with Nintendo Switch Online to high heaven regardless of whether parental controls would have prevented it.
People point to Breath of the Wild, but that launched same day on Wii U and Switch. They weren't reselling you the game unless you chose the buy the Wii U version and then later wanted it on Switch.
This is Nintendo. They'll re-release it.
The Wii U bombed, a console that played it safe, and the story we're told is it was because the name confused consumers / was improperly marketed. I'm not sure that's the whole picture, but this is a risk yet again with the release of the OLED and Switch lite not that long ago.
They still have the "Nintendo advantage" of their products being unique and family-oriented on the market, but that's not always enough. At any rate the timing seems to be right (notwithstanding supply issues), it's roughly a decade since the Switch was originally released. Sony and MSFT already made the jump.
Another consideration: I'm not sure what the innovation/novelty options are at this point. Maybe they don't have much of a choice but to capitalize on a rock-solid 1st party line-up. Right now I think Nintendo does couch co-op better than anyone else, so they could drive that even further.
> One Switch 2 demo is a souped up version of Switch launch title Zelda: Breath of the Wild, designed to hit the Switch 2's beefier target specs. (To be clear, though - this is just a tech demo. There's no suggestion the game will be re-released.)
Interesting that it's just the graphics being shown off. Its not clear if it's a "switch 2" or if it'll have other strange hardware/form factor quirks, all we have so far is "the graphics hardware will be better".
One hopes it'll be good.
I don't think Nintendo is dim enough to release a Switch 2 next year and try to re-release Breath of the Wild for it.
In fact I'll go out on a limb and suggest that based on previous console lifecycles, and the way the 1st party support tends to trail off towards the end of the cycle so they can dev on the new console so it can have a release line up, and the way that (current) Switch releases are powering through like there isn't a new console coming out in a year, that we're looking at a very high probability of a 100% backwards compatible console here. Otherwise I think they'd be holding more of this stuff back for the next release.
With the way consoles work nowadays it'd be pretty easy for them to release a new engine for BotW/TotK for a Switch 2 that just comes down as a patch like any other when you plug the cartridge in. And you hardly even need a new engine just to push out a higher res display, as emulators prove.
Nintendo is also in a different position this time around, as the WiiU, DS, 3DS, etc had such different hardware that remaking a game for the Switch was essentially a necessity, whereas I expect the Switch 2 to be a Switch with faster hardware.
...and still be able to play Breath of the Wild on it. (Although, to be fail, the mainstream user probably won't be doing that.)
I hope it'll be like the PS4 Pro though (or cross-generation PS/xbox games), where developers are not allowed to make their game "switch 2 only". It didn't work at all for their "New Nintendo 2/3DS" line, only a small handful of games ended up being made or optimized for the improved hardware (https://www.reddit.com/r/3DS/wiki/exclusives/)
The Switch does well because it's a bunch of things that your smartphone isn't -- bigger screen, better controls, and also a home console that connects to your TV -- while still being small enough that it's easy to slip into a bag you might be carrying.
Emulation is a thing now, and small third party hardware makers are filling the niche. And at the other end phones have more power than even the Switch has. That's why the SteamDeck or ROG Ally are on the bigger side. Betting against the smartphone is a losing bet.
I never play my Switch undocked and all I can think about is how much beefier the internals could have been if they hadn’t made it a dual use device.
They have, for example, OG Gameboy sized consoles with enough power to emulate everyting up to about PS1/Gamecube: https://anbernic.com/products/rg35xx
For another, Nintendo rarely discounts their main consoles just because a successor comes out. The "Nintendo 2DS" system went to its lowest price of $100 MSRP in 2015[0], one year before the Switch was even announced, and included a free game. But when the Switch came out, neither the 3DS/2DS systems, nor the home console Wii U, saw a price drop in response.
Other consoles, like their Wii, Gamecube, and DS, saw price drops near the end of the lifespan, but not in response to the new console coming out. And the Switch has kept its same MSRP this entire time, not counting the Switch Lite coming out at a cheaper price tag.
Not to say that'll never happen, but historically, the price cut would've happened by now...
[0] https://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2015/08/20/ninte...
When is the optimal time to sell your used Switch 1?
Check eBay prices and local Craigslist/FB market place.
I had an intel CPU with an integrated GPU at the time and a laptop and servers at home.