Man I’ve just forgotten about Nintendo at this point. Microsoft and Sony get that exclusives aren’t working when people don’t have enough money to buy every system anymore. I see Nintendo as a niche console with a handful of games. There’s just not enough to justify buying one, and I grew up on Zelda and Metroid. I love them, but it’s not worth buying another console for a few high priced games with questionable performance.
What exactly do you consider high priced? $60 for a game that you end up playing for 10 hours is only $6 an hour. Compared to the price of a movie ticket, that’s pretty cheap entertainment.
You can try to rationalize it all you want, bottom line is people don’t have money to buy $80 games these days. Those people aren’t going to the movies either.
I bought a rug that I’ve gotten years of value out of, should it have been thousands of dollars then? The idea that time used is how you measure value is flawed.
As far as games go, it’s still a lot. I’ve played some $20 games for hundreds of hours. Not a dealbreaker, and I’ll gladly buy the game if it looks fun. On the other hand, the games generally being expensive is not a selling point for the console.
The Switch has sold more than the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S combined. Very “niche”
Cool. And Sony can sell to PS and PC, same with Xbox. They have two markets, one that they don’t have to support with hardware. They can also make games that look nice and run nice because they have much better hardware. Plus they actually do cross play with each other, making bigger player pools for match making and such.
We’re not talking about consoles sold. I’m talking about game choice and experience. If you want to look at how you can play the games, there are a few more PCs than Switches sold.
But sure, Mario Party is fun every so often.
Best selling PS5 game: Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 @ 11 million
9th best selling Switch game: Super Mario Party @ 21.1 million
Super Mario Party Jamboree released in October and already sold over 6 million.
But sure, I guess Nintendo is the niche one
Cool and how many games are there on the system? With no backwards compatibility for these expensive games? How many shooters are popular on switch? Or is it that they lock down their IP and it’s marketed strongly towards children and cashing in on nostalgia.
But sure, nuance doesn’t matter. Nintendo is clearly the best system with the best games. I wonder how gaming PCs are even selling anymore, no one even should be playing on anything else it’s so obviously good. Jesus…
Bet they priced it that high to get ahead of any tariffs that might affect them. Consumers really don’t like to see price hikes right around a launch. Plus they still want to milk the Switch 1 since they probably have a very healthy profit margin on that machine. This price makes the Switch 1 look very appealing for people who still haven’t bought one.
Okay, but why are they charging $80 for a digital game, which tariffs don’t apply to?
I believe the tariffs do apply to digital goods as well depending where the server is.
Either way, the main reason would be because of digital was cheaper it would cannibalize physical sales.
How could it? It’s just data, no physical goods are being imported. Do tariffs apply to phone calls from other countries?
It doesn’t matter if it’s data, tariffs are meant to be protectionist so you could easily say that since Nintendo is headquartered in Japan or because the majority of their workers are in Japan or because their name sounds vaguely Japanese that all sales of their product in insert country here has to pay an additional 10% tax
I don’t THINK that’s how tariffs work - I’m pretty sure it’s physical goods only - but I’m no expert, so I guess we’ll see.
They currently don’t affect digital goods but there is no actual reason they couldn’t make one that does we are in some truly interesting times
120 and 4K are often claimed on console specs but are rarely achieved within games. At best it will be capable of that when playing Netflix or streaming.
Or it’s actually running at 720p30 and being FSR/framegenned into a blurry shimmery mess. There’s no way Nintendo managed to cram a chip powerful enough to render its own Switch 1 games at true 4k120 into a tablet.
The real advantage of a 120 Hz screen is that you get a much more graceful degradation if you dip below your fps target for a bit. If you’re targeting 30 fps but drop to 25, it still feels pretty smooth on a high-refresh screen, whereas that’s appallingly clunky on a low-refresh one. A “poor man’s gsync”, if you will.
To the gsync comment, the Switch 2’s screen also has VRR
High refresh screen and 4K support is a surprise to me, that’s very nice when it comes to Nintendo standards.
On the other hand, It’s very weird that they didn’t announce a price at the showcase… It sounds like this might be more expensive than what everybody’s expecting it to be.
There’s not going to be a single worthwhile game that will run natively at 4k. And i have my doubts about 1080@120 too. Maybe they can keep their polygons so low they can actually reach it, but then what’s the point?
