That[1] was masterful marketing of an upcoming videogame console on all fronts. From the beginning it emphasises mobility with a (hopefully good!) smartphone app to manage online/local wifi matches, as well as multiple levels of play while on the go. It's reasonably priced (matches current generation in total at the register) and has an incredibly diverse range of titles to be excited about this calendar year. It managed to loop "The Americas" in with a Reggie appearance that worked well, and upsold Skyrim and Fifa, two gigantic American games with international appeal. They also talked up Dragon Quest X, which is an MMORPG, launching on Switch, as well as Dragon Quest XI, which until tonight was a PS4 exclusive.
Essentially, they placed value squarely in the face of everything your PC/enthusiast-level gaming rig won't ever replace. The ability to pick up and play elsewhere. Like the Wii, it's not even trying to compete with the current crop of consoles. It's value proposition will be placed somewhere a bit obtusely, between your mobile phone and everything else you leave at home. Yes, this obviously functions as a home console as well, but I can't help but suspect Nintendo absolutely meant to go for what makes handhelds great. If any company can do it, they can. So what if it cannibalises their current 3DS offerings? Pokemon seems to be going strong with its fanbase.
The whole presentation, from the demonstration of the hardware to especially the finishing trademark "One more thing!" with Zelda making a predictable but nonetheless amazing launch date. It's a strategy that worked wonders for the Wii, remember, so why not?
Nintendo absolutely killed it, and I'll be keeping a really close eye on this thing. But the marketing and presentation was honestly textbook.
-Price: Exactly the same as the basic Wii U at launch. Comparing it to the PS4 is disingenuous as it is a 4 year old console [1], it is £100 cheaper than the PS4 Pro deals currently on Amazon. Who are 'most people'? This article implies that it is the expected price point [2]: http://time.com/4632820/nintendo-switch-nx/.
-Storage: The Wii U only had a basic 8GB which is enough for most use cases except downloading games. The switch can extend with SD cards too. As games will be shipped on cards like the DS I doubt this will be an issue for the average user.
-Online: I would consider the playing with others side of this more important than the free game. Though it is a shame that the games are only for the month. This is a fairly new thing for Nintendo so I hope it improves.
-Launch: it might have a few but I expect the fact that one of them is Zelda will help it a lot.
Personally I'm excited for it and it is perfect for my kind of gaming: mostly on the go. I'm rarely at home long enough to make the investment into systems that I can't take with me. Of course, YMMV.
[1] I'm not making a judgement call on specs here, just pointing out that, of course, an older console is cheaper.
Storage is really a non-issue. You can get enough space for 10 AAA-quality games (presumably 25GB each) for $80: http://amzn.to/2iPJOja (Ironically, it's a Sony product...)
And an even more conservative tripling of storage (64GB card) only sets you back about $20: http://amzn.to/2jfrROp
But I still buy the vast majority of my games on physical media, mainly because that's the only way to get a good discount. Until there's the option to be price-competitive via 3rd-party sellers, I'm not buying into any on-device game store at all.
The battery life is bad, but I'm not that surprised by it. Current phone/tablets achieve a lot of their battery longevity by throttling performance, this is something that is not really acceptable when your device is a games console first.
I can only imagine that if an iPad mini had to run a program as intensive as the upcoming Zelda appears to be that its battery life would also suffer.
The Switch GPU does clock down to 307MHz when undocked. In docked mode, it can run at 768MHz, about 2.5x faster. CPU and memory speeds are unaffected.
The built in screen is fairly low resolution so there are potentially fewer pixels to push when the Switch is undocked. It remains to be seen exactly how quality/performance will be affected by undocking.
Absolutely agree. This whole presentation just shown that Nintendo excels at killing good hype. I know several people(including me) who were going to preorder today as soon as they could, but after the news dropped about the price and how late the games are going to arrive, no one did. I work at a large games publisher, sitting in the office full of people who are full-on gaming enthusiasts, and I haven't yet met a single person who is not disappointed by that presentation.
"The games are on cartridges.. what year is this?"
Assuming you are referencing optical media: A year in which optical media is actually having a hard time keeping up with cartridges in capacity and size and gets blown away on random read speed. (Possibly raw read speed too, depending on the specs.)
In the PS1/PS2 era, the optical media advantage in size and price per MB was clear. In the PS3 era it was possibly less clear, but still advantage optical media. But that advantage is largely gone now. The only advantage optical media has now is that it is still cheaper to make per MB (or GB if you prefer now), but carts have gotten cheap enough that that isn't necessarily a killer anymore.
Plus as I understand it, very few games even now fill a DVD, let alone fill a Bluray. And the optical media have some very significant disadvantages that are getting worse and worse relative to the rest of the hardware over time, particularly random read latency. Even the PS3 era required a lot of hacking under a lot of game's hoods to arrange the exact order things appeared on the disk to be able to stream in at anything like a reasonable speed, which is why this generation just straight-up requires you to install it to a hard drive (at least sometimes, I don't know if it's every game)... and even the hard drives they can afford to put in consoles at scale are starting to become performance bottlenecks themselves!
Optical media also means you aren't portable, which is a bit of a downer for the Switch.
Assuming you mean "why include anything at all and just let people download to local flash", I imagine it's because Nintendo still wants to sell to people who may not have internet connections that casually download 5GBs. Also, cartridge ROMs are a lot cheaper than flashable media, which is still expensive relative to the size of modern games to put in a console. I've got 512GB of very nice flash in my laptop, but that part alone cost more than the entire Switch. I imagine hitting their price points with enough flash to make it so that you're not constantly deciding which 5 AAA games you can fit on there would be quite difficult. Plus if they do ship out a game console in which the games are constantly "thrashing", Nintendo will actually pay for all the additional downloading that will result. And the end-user result is poor; "hey thanks for inviting us over but three of us need to agonize over which games to delete and then three of use will use your network connection to re-download Splatoon 2, oh dear, look at that, it's gonna take 5 hours" is not what they are looking for.
SD cards are not a perfect answer either; quality varies greatly. I can see why the 3DS has gotten away with it even as a putatively AAA console might not want to trust it entirely. It would help if people didn't buy the cheapest thing they could find with the capacity they want, but they do.
In the context of a discussion about Nintendo, the PSP can't be called successful, though.
And the battery power issues have relatively gotten more acute since then, as have the performance issues. It's less viable now than it was then, and it's debatable whether it was a good idea then.
> Plus as I understand it, very few games even now fill a DVD, let alone fill a Bluray.
On average, yes, but that's because "indie" and mobile games are quite small. An average big budget Activision/EA/Ubisoft game has been Bluray sized for years.
The WiiU already supported Downloading Games from their store, i'd expect this to be able to do the same, the question is just how big of an SD Card you want to cram in there.
That's what I don't get. With only 32GB of storage Nintendo is not making it easy to go all digital which is something that they should want to do as they get a bigger cut when people buy directly from them.
> battery life: potentially only 2.5 hours? Really not good enough for a handheld.
Whoah, can you source that? If that number is even remotely true the thing is completely useless as a handheld due to requiring 2-3 extra batteries for any longish trip.
From the presentation. They mentioned it was 2.5 to 6, but expect worst case with battery life. You can plug a USB-C to charge it with a power bank from what I gather.
Nintendo having an history of using proprietary cable, this is great news. Having the possibility to charge all of your device with one cable and sharing a unique powerbank is something really cool.
Yep, the Nintendo 3DS came with a 1750 mAh battery and that lasted for 3-5 hours. Get a small power bank or a 10,000 mAh one and you're set for the whole day. I don't think battery is too much of a problem.
Yup, agreed. I have a big powerbank i use for everything at home and i see no reason to increase the bulk of the Switch itself to include a bigger battery.
Likewise if it wasn't built in but came with the product, i'd be wanting a lower priced product not including the external battery.
Funny, I thought the price was really cheap, I was more worried about the relatively high prices on accessories.
Battery life is on par with portable gaming devices currently so I am not sure if your expectations are a bit unrealistic. That said, it's 2.5 - 6 hours depending on the game. Something like Pokemon on the go might be a lot longer than 2.5 hours for something like Legend of Zelda.
Storage is probably ok. First, it's a cartridge based system so I don't expect game installs to take as much space as something like the PS4. Moreover, as others have pointed out, you can expand it by adding an SD card fairly cheaply...which is more than can be said for most consoles currently.
Online offering is pretty weak and I am disappointed that the industry has now made it "normal" for users to pay for online play in the console world...but oh well. On the other hand, local multiplayer and up to 8 device LANs is awesome!
Titles at launch are limited...but to be honest Zelda at launch will probably be enough to carry them through.
Regarding your killers, consider that the Switch has a USB-C connector so it may be possible to charge it on the go with a portable battery (perhaps even during use). That is huge when compared against the limitations of most gaming laptops (I am not familiar with other gaming portables though). Price is price, but I would focus more on the accessory costs than the console cost itself.
The X1 Shield tablet's FCC filing show it also has a 5200mah battery so I'm guessing the layout is similar to the K1 and the Switch (the Switch filing just says the battery is non-removable).
Err, if you follow through, it's a movie, not a game. The cheapest console+game on the top link is 230, and most are 250. These are also the previous generation of the PS4.
Do you really need more than 2.5 hours of battery power? I can imagine myself playing on the dock in the morning, taking the train and using the battery for 1 hour, working/school, taking the train with the battery for 1 more hour and then dock it back on.
Um, yes? 2.5 hours is terrible. Besides a daily commute, many flights are more than 1 hour. Also, it'd be nice to not have my device die immediately if I forgot to charge it three times a day.
I've flown hundreds of times in my life and never been on a plane which had power or usb sockets. Airbus 320/Boeing 737 don't tend to be equipped with them.
Sorry, but that's just impossible, really. Any sufficiently long flight, especially international, ALWAYS has power connectors and/or USB slots. Admittedly the power plug is often hard to find, hidden under the seat or armrest, but the USB slots are usually right below the heads up screen for movies. Unless you're flying extremely short distances only, power is basically included in all flights at this point. This applies to coach as well.
Ok,let's have a game. Take any European flight with Ryanair, Easyjet or Jet2.com. If you find yourself on a plane with USB or power outlets,I will happily refund your flight in entirety. Like I said,I have flown hundreds of times(20-30 times a year for about 5 years), only with those airlines, all flights were about 2-3 hours long, and not a single one of them had USB/power sockets.
You're definitely not looking hard enough then. Like I said, they are typically hiding somewhere under the seats. There is NO WAY a super common flight like LA to NY does not have power.
I'm on a plane at least once a month with Delta and American Airlines and even small regional jets tend to have USB plugs or power outlets. It may be hidden under the seat or in the arm rest, but what they're saying is true. Most if not all airplanes have power available.
I do want to point out that it matches current consoles in the US, but is actually going to be significantly more expensive than anything on the market in many countries. Where I am, for example, if they release at exactly the US price -- which they won't, prices always get inflated -- a Switch will cost more than a PS4 that comes packed with Fallout 4, Skyrim, and Dishonored 2, three hit games.
On top of this, I think they've made a fatal flaw when it comes to handheld pricing. If you remember, the 3DS launched at $250, tanked hard, and received a whopping 33% price cut only 4 months after it launched, followed by the announcement of the new 2DS which would be even cheaper. One of the things Nintendo produced the 2DS is because they found, to their great surprise, that almost 80% of 3DS customers outside Japan never took their 3DS outside the home. They weren't buying it for portability, like Japanese customers usually did; they were buying it because it was the cheapest way to play videogames, only a third the price of a console and with games that were half the price of console games (in many countries even less). Right now I can buy a 2DS for 105 and brand-new games for 40 where an Xbox One is 400 and games are 80 - 100. That's a big reason many of my friends have one.
Then note that they've also priced the Switch above the iPad Mini. Most handhelds are bought by parents for kids. If parents see that they can get an iPad for less than the price of this new console, they're very likely to: iPads are seen as luxury products with a wider variety of uses and many cheap games, and the iPad Mini is even more portable. This is the first handheld Nintendo have announced since iPads hit the market and I worry they haven't taken this into account.
For those customers, who make up a majority of 3DS customers worldwide, the Switch is a non-starter; it's likely to be considerably more expensive than its rivals, and those rivals happen to have either larger libraries, greater popularity, free online, and better graphics (Xbox One/PS4) or a luxury image, greater portability, lower software costs, and a wider variety of uses including educational uses (iPad Mini). I'm really hoping Nintendo succeeds, because I'm a big fan of theirs, but I worry they have totally killed the big draws to handhelds.
> They weren't buying it for portability, like Japanese customers usually did; they were buying it because it was the cheapest way to play videogames
That's not true, they are buying a 3ds so they can play Pokemon. Without Pokemon every kid I know would rather have an iphone/ipad than a 3ds. (I'm talking about Pokemon Omega Ruby style games, not Pokemon Go).
They've sold 63.3 million 3DS units (counting the 2DS) and 14.7 million copies of Pokemon X & Y, the bestselling Pokemon game on the platform. So while it's undoubtedly a very popular game I don't think you can rank it above cost as the reason so many people were buying handhelds to use at home.
IIRC, they always try to sell their consoles at a profit, unlike the other companies in this space. It's part of why the Wii was such an amazing success for them (combined with their successful Blue Ocean strategy[0]).
Could you elaborate on what you consider to be Nintendo's Blue Ocean strategy? I mean, I get that they've often tried to be first movers with e.g. motion control, is that what you're referring to?
Specifically, it's that they do stuff qualitatively that their competitors don't, to the point where they're not so much competing as they are the sole player in a brand new market.
I remember when the seventh generation came out, Microsoft did Nintendo's PR work for them by telling people that they can buy both a 360 and a Wii for the price of a PS3. That's right, they got Microsoft of all people to tell consumers to buy a Wii! Why did MS do it? Because the Wii is so qualitatively different from the 360 that they weren't directly competing.
Nintendo set things up such that nobody would ever ask "should I get a 360 or a Wii?" the way people would ask "should I get a 360 or a PS3?". Instead, they made it so a large amount of gamers wanted to get both a "normal" console and a Wii in the same way that people own both a console and a PC. On top of that, they also attracted people who would never buy a normal console because normal consoles don't appeal to them at all.
> On top of that, they also attracted people who would never buy a normal console because normal consoles don't appeal to them at all.
Sounds like me. I don't buy a gaming system to play games generally, I buy one to play the kind of games Nintendo makes and attracts to its hardware. That's why I still pull my Gamecube out to play SSBM from time to time, but have never owned a Playstation or X-Box, and have barely touched either of them. I haven't had a new system since GBA and Gamecube, but I think I'd enjoy the newer Nintendo systems more than the systems they were released next to.
> They weren't buying it for portability, like Japanese customers usually did; they were buying it because it was the cheapest way to play videogames, only a third the price of a console and with games that were half the price of console games (in many countries even less).
I don't think that's right, price is not the only concern here. It's just a different feeling, from having to start a session on the TV or being able to play around the house, in bed, etc. -- tablets did that well also, and most people are more likely to open their 3DS than start up the TV and console. That's what they attempted to match here, and, to me, it seems successful. (Note that Wii U was directed towards that goal as well, but failed).
Are people really behaving like that? Was WiiU feature of being able to play the game on controller only successful?
Or will it take the backseat when the customers notice that PS4 offers a lot more content for lower price? Especially since use of cartriges will mean that the games will be and stay more expensive than their PS4 counterparts?
It's especially bothersome to me when parents use "learning" apps to try and pretend that they're being a more productive parent by giving their child an iPad. Perhaps they can do some good, but their effects are also vastly overstated and are no substitute for hands-on physical teaching by parents.
My iPhone now has a bunch of 2D Sonics, Roller Coaster Tycoon Classic, The Binding Of Isaac, a full port of Lego Star Wars, Surgeon Simulator, Minecraft, Hearthstone and a few others. Seems like iOS supports real games to me.
My youngest stepson (10) just got one for Christmas (secondhand iPad mini 2). He's mostly gaming on it, and he loves it. Bear in mind he has access to an xbox one, too. He doesn't see the iPad as inferior; he certainly did the hudl that he sold in order to part fund the iPad purchase.
Games are the number 1 app category in the iOS app store. [1] and smartphone + tablet game market is bigger than either console or PC game market.[2] So people clearly see them as gaming devices.
They also compete for a limited amount of time. There are very few console gamers who also don't have a smartphone or tablet with some games on it. They may not explicitly choose to game on their phone over Xbox, and they may acknowledge that they enjoy console games more. But on a given night, maybe they choose to watch tv, and second screen some games on their phone. And if that phone didn't exist, they would have chosen to play on their console. So they aren't equivalent, but they can still substitute for each other, and compete for time/money/attention.
Gaming in the living room? Xbox wins.
Gaming in the bedroom? iPad wins.
Gaming on a trip to visit Grandma? iPad wins.
Gaming on holiday? iPad wins.
Want to play low budget or free casual games? iPad wins.
Obviously a sample size of one - you can disqualify just about every comment anyone makes in such a way, so I'm not sure I see the relevance of it in the context of a discussion explicitly mentioning personal experience? It is of course completely possible that he's the only kid in the world who sees it the way he does.
I don't see them as equal in terms of specs, but I'm not interested in the same things as a 10 year old. I asked my stepson about it this morning, and he gave what I think was a pretty well-reasoned argument off the cuff about it, mostly that the games on the iPad are completely different to those on the xbox, and he prefers the games that are on whichever platform they are on, and he likes the portable nature of the iPad, but the xbox because multiple players can play together. Sounded like a more coherent review of the differences than I've read on some websites.
It's not all about specs, it's about gameplay. I'd actually say I've -enjoyed- playing games on the ZX Spectrum more than some PC games (with infinitely better graphics, sound etc), because I enjoy the game more, and because they could never rely on looking flash to engage you, so they -had- to be excellent games. Technically, there's no way that Manic Miner is a better game than all the FPS that my eldest stepson plays, but I'd take Manic Miner any day of the week.
Which has lead to the current market of free-to-play (pay-to-win) games and ruined potential most legitimate indie titles to thrive on the platform.
Jeff Minter himself has abandoned iOS altogether, leaving an amazing collection of some of the tightest controlling and most gorgeous retro styled iOS arcade shooters completely defunct like they never existed. (Minotaur Project) [0]
(Let this also be a lesson to back up your iOS stuff, iCloud will not save apps that are removed from the App Store).
Personally, I use my iPad for games when I travel (and sometimes during my twice-a-week commute) and at home I play games almost exclusively on PS4. I rarely, if ever, play games on my laptop now, despite having over 300 games on Steam.
My house has a PS4, Ps3, Wii-U, a gaming PC, a Vita, and two 3DS machines. My kids spend 90% of their gaming hours on an iPad or phone. The PS4 is my favorite device.
Depends on the parents and the kids. Some kids love to play on their tablets and others prefer 3DS or similar.
You can't say that no kids (or teenagers or adults) play on tablets.
I personally am excited for the Switch and will get one at launch. And for me personally, the Wii U is the best console of this generation. But I'm not nearly as enthusiastic about the Switch in general as you are from this presentation.
So far it feels like "the Wii part 3". Yes the Wii sold well, but it didn't sell very many games. Most Wii owners were perfectly content with Wii Sports. The Wii U has pretty much been a flop. Nothing about this presentation suggests to me the Switch will finally do what Nintendo has tried three times now: make a gimmicky, low powered console that appeals in non traditional ways and is successful. So far (and sure, a 1 hour video 3 months before launch isn't much), this very much feels like the Wii and Wii U, and not in the good ways.
I love Nintendo and am a huge fan. But part of me can't help but wish Nintendo would just straight up compete with Sony and Microsoft.
I don't know why there is the perception that the Wii didn't sell many games. That's definitely not true, it had incredible first party game sales beyond Wii Sports, and it actually had good third party sales as well. Here is a list of 5 million+ sellers, including mega hits like Mario Kart which sold 36.8 million and New Super Mario Brothers which sold 29.9 million copies.
Nintendo and arguably Microsoft simply can't compete with Sony right now.
Sony is dominating the high end, exclusive game market. The Last of Us, Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid and coming up in 2017: Horizon Zero Dawn, Death Stranding etc. All of these push the console to the limits and show just how superior the PS4 hardware is over its competitors.
Nintendo isn't really suited anyway. Their games are arguably better cel-shaded and cartoon-like. And so why not appeal to the less hardcore, graphics obsessed gamers. There's far more of them after all.
As years go by the less I'm convinced that the platform with the fastest hardware is the best. With consoles, on the technical front, I want constant fluid framerates and predictability. For instance, I fail to see how PS4 Witcher 3 could be better than Witcher 3 on XBox one by any standard I care about when gaming (and I'm a professional graphics programmer).
That said, yes, it seems Sony is winning this generation in consoles. But I would claim it's due to other factors than PS4 as a piece of hardware and OS.
No PS4 is winning because of their exclusives. When you have Uncharted 4 for example as GOTY it makes it very hard for people not to choose your console.
The reason the hardware is important is because games like Uncharted, Last of Us etc (which are system sellers) stand apart from the likes of Witcher 3 because of the ability to use the superior hardware to product superior graphics. I would argue this is just as important as the game play. But again not for all games just these specific type of games.
Yes, we agree that PS4 as a platform is more succesfull than the xbox. I disagree it has much to do with hardware specs.
Yes, PS4 has a slightly better GPU but even if PS4 and Xbox one shipped with hardware where xbox one was slightly better it would not affect the current market share that much.
Up to a point superior graphics are created by superior artists and animators. Using engine and art assets by superior programmers.
Uncharted is so good because of Naughty Dog, not because their platform happens to be PS4.
Sony has played their part well, whereas Micrsoft fumbled the Xbox one launch and positioning.
The Witcher 3 is much more open world than Uncharted 4. I don't think this is a matter of optimising for the specific hardware, it is mainly the trade-offs inherent in a large open world game vs a linear game with small well defined levels. They each optimise for different values.
The PS4 has more powerful hardware than the XBox One. If they are running the same game (The Witcher 3), logic tells us that it will be easier to get fluid framerates with the more powerful console. And that is what you care about, no?
Now I don't know about The Witcher per-se but there have been a good number of multi-platform releases where performance and fluidity were compromised on XBox One.
And it doesn't just seem to be Sony, the numbers say it's Sony (especially in Europe). General consensus is that Microsoft severely botched the launch of the One and has been left to play catch-up since.
As I said; I don't know specifically about The Witcher. I used the name as an example. There will always be additional factors beside hardware power, but in general; more powerful hardware is easier to get good results with.
> As years go by the less I'm convinced that the platform with the fastest hardware is the best.
It's never been the case.
The GC was the most powerful console of its generation, the PS2 was by far the least powerful one (with the possible exception of the Dreamcast, not quite sure where that one was).
Gamecube was quite memory-limited both in main and video RAM compared to XBox and PS2. My team was not the only one that had to play tricks to fit on that thing, swapping in and out parts of main memory (to/from the overly spacious audio memory area IIRC).
> Gamecube was quite memory-limited both in main and video RAM
I'm not saying it was a supreme machine without limitation, I'm saying it was the most powerful one. It had by a fairly large margin the most powerful CPU and GPU subsystems.
That doesn't mean there were no tradeoffs, it was all strength and it was necessarily trivial to make use of that power. Think PS3.
XBox was comfortably more powerful than the GC, GC was ahead but more similar to PS2 in practice, both were well ahead of the Dreamcast (Dreamcast launched first, PS2 next, XBox and GC last, so kinda to be expected). GC was hamstrung by memory issues (PS2 had better bandwidth, fill rate, media capacity, iirc), so was a bugger to use its power, but that's by the by.
So, I disagree with the first claim in your second paragraph, but my pedantry only supports your main point: PS2 won, selling 3 times the others put together. But PS2 was a long way from being the most powerful.
But, both as a developer and player, and purely subjectively, I do think XBox was the 'best' of that generation.
> The GC was the most powerful console of its generation,
That's not true. The Xbox was far more powerful CPU/GPU-wise, and had far more storage (the 8 GB HD was pretty amazing) so games could install themselves to HD and use virtual memory to increase their performance.
I mostly agree, but I'm worried about what it means for third-party support.
If the Switch is significantly underpowered compared to the competition, it means that developers won't be able to easily port XBone/PS4 games to the Switch which will hurt the Switch's lineup. In that case, Nintendo's best hope for success is that their Blue Ocean Strategy will take off and people will treat the Switch as not just another console but as a supremely versatile handheld.
The reason the Wii got away with it was a) Blue Ocean Strategy gave it genuinely unique games and b) the PS2 was still kicking around so the Wii version can easily be ported to PS2 and sell on twice the number of consoles (i.e. they'd make a 360/PS3 version and a Wii/PS2 version).
The Wii U had beautiful games with beautiful art direction (Yoshi's Woolly World, anyone?), but it still flopped largely because third parties ignored it and Nintendo didn't have a good enough Blue Ocean Strategy.
With that combination, you need something like the art direction of a Studio Ghibli in order to successfully manage the complexity (excited for the new Ni no Kuni, BTW). Most, maybe all, game studios in the west are not up to the challenge. Many indie games are much more artistically successful precisely because they have to think around the constraints and can work with a more concentrated vision.
>But part of me can't help but wish Nintendo would just straight up compete with Sony and Microsoft. //
Surely though if you want that experience you can buy a PS4/Xbone/PC. Personally I'm really happy that Nintendo continues to give a different twist to their consoles and provide some texture to the market.
But will you still be happy if Nintendo bows out of the market altogether? It's no coincidence they are exploring mobile games. They aren't exactly killing it these days. If the Switch doesn't do well, I wouldn't be surprised to see Nintendo go completely 3rd party.
That would be a big shame IMO. I think, the Wii and WiiU have both brought interesting developments and that the Switch looks like it will develop things to - bring tighter integration between mobile and home gaming.
Surely the next step would be VR, though it's probably right to enter that arena partnered with an established player.
If smart-watches/wearables push on then people may move away from using a smart-phone form factor and instead have a paired device trailer more towards gaming and media.
I wonder if Switch can (in theory) run Android, whether it'll have Skype or other video calling (I didn't notice a camera?).
> I love Nintendo and am a huge fan. But part of me can't help but wish Nintendo would just straight up compete with Sony and Microsoft.
Well I don't love Nintendo, I think their consoles are pretty gimmicky and sales are fueled mostly by nostalgia and rehashing the same game titles over and over again (the Switch is getting a Zelda title and a Mario title? What a shocker!)
I honestly don't believe Nintendo is capable of competing with Sony or Microsoft. Maybe they could create hardware on-par with a PS4, but they can't get the publisher relations down, nor have they been able to get their online service to feature-parity with Xbox Live circa 2007 after a decade of trying. They also have this awful customer-hostile attitude that simply will not go away.
(Why should anybody have to buy a game title more than once, just because they bought a new game console? That's pure scam, Nintendo. On Xbox, you buy it once and you own it forever. On Nintendo, people re-buy Super Mario Bros 3 like clockwork every 3 years.)
Which is fine. There's already lots of competition in the "high powered console gaming" arena, and Nintendo would run the risk of becoming another SteamBox. And if their strength is nostalgia, maybe embracing that is a good business decision, even if the constant rehashing of the same titles over and over personally makes me gag.
> rehashing the same game titles over and over again (the Switch is getting a Zelda title and a Mario title? What a shocker!)
You say that like this is a bad thing. Nintendo isn't just making the same games over and over again. Every new Mario game, and every new Zelda game, brings something new to the genre. For example, Super Mario Galaxy was a very innovative and award-winning game that had a very unique and well-thought-out core mechanic. And this new Super Mario Odyssey game they announced looks like it has a ton of stuff that hasn't been done in a Mario game before.
And ultimately, the first-party games Nintendo puts out, your Marios and Zeldas and whatnot, are always very polished, excellently-designed, and downright fun games. Typically the best games on the whole platform. So it's no surprise that they keep coming back to the same franchises, since they've demonstrated that they can execute extremely well with this IP and that fans absolutely love it. It's not unreasonable to say that Mario and Zelda by themselves sell a large portion of Nintendo's consoles.
The innovations they've been doing lately have mostly had diminishing returns. Super Mario Galaxy, for example, was an alright game, but it was nowhere near as innovative as Super Mario 64 was. I don't even remember if I finished it or not, but I remember that SM64 Bowser boss fight to this day.
I don't know if anyone ever argues that Nintento's first party games aren't the best games on their consoles. It just for many, myself included, the 5 or 6 excellent games that come out don't really justify the price of the console and the HDMI slot it occupies. I know I've never been able to justify a WII U (though Bayonetta 2 came close).
I hope they do better with the Switch—I'd love to justify the purchase :-). But I'm certainly not getting one at launch.
The Fire Emblem and Bravely Default series on 3ds are both as good as any series on other platforms. Wii and Wii U are difficult cases but the DS line has in general been an incredibly good console platform. I actually think it was the best of the last generation. Maybe the switch can carry that on but I'm not sure.
The 3DS has some excellent third party exclusive games, mainly RPGs. I really can't think of anything comparable on the Wii or Wii U that I feel I'm missing out on, except for the first party titles.
A lot of people consider Bayonetta 2 to be a console-seller (though personally, I've only tried it for a few minutes and the intro to that game is super confusing). There's also some other great games that, while aren't exclusive, do have unique features on Wii U (e.g. leveraging the gamepad), such as Rayman Legends. As for RPGs, there's Xenoblade Chronicles X.
> Nintendo isn't just making the same games over and over again.
Let's say I haven't owned a Nintendo console in a long time (which is true-- the last one I bought was a GameCube, which was a piece of crap so I sold it to my step-sister), how would I be able to tell that 2017's Mario is any different than 2014's Mario is any different than 2011's Mario?
If Nintendo genuinely has new game play ideas, maybe they should actually put those ideas in new games. They're not incapable of this-- for example, Splatoon looks genuinely innovative-- but they're more interested in keeping the nostalgia factor than marketing new game concepts. There's one Splatoon for every 10 Mario X or Zelda X or Metroid X.
> And ultimately, the first-party games Nintendo puts out, your Marios and Zeldas and whatnot, are always very polished, excellently-designed, and downright fun games.
Possibly; that doesn't make me interested in buying them. The 1998 Psycho color remake was very polished, excellently designed, etc. But it was just an identical remake of a movie that'd already been made, and if you've seen the original there's no point to seeing the remake.
> Typically the best games on the whole platform.
Because Nintendo's great at games, or because they can't convince anybody else to develop games for their wonky-ass platforms? The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
Just to drop a note here from the Xbox universe, the Xbox perennial first-party title is Halo. Halo 4 and Halo 5 kind of suck. Kind of suck a lot, really. But the strength of Xbox is that if Halo sucks, you can play Titanfall or Evolve or Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare or Battlefield 4 or... you get the point. And that's just in that one genre.
Unlike Nintendo, Microsoft (and Sony) isn't crippled by bad first-party games. If they were they'd probably put a heck of a lot more effort into ensuring their first-party games didn't kind of suck. So it's kind of an apples-to-orange comparison. Nintendo first-party titles are good because Nintendo has far more incentive to make them good.
> It's not unreasonable to say that Mario and Zelda by themselves sell a large portion of Nintendo's consoles.
Of course not; that's exactly what I've been saying. The company relies almost exclusively on nostalgia to sell its products. Mario and Zelda are nostalgic titles.
They're not remakes. There's a difference between using the same characters in brand new games, and remaking old games. Your entire comment reads as though you consider them to be literal remakes, and that's completely wrong. People aren't also just buying them for nostalgia. After all, they're new games, it's hard to be nostalgic about new stuff. People are buying them because they're really really fun. And you'll note that kids, who definitely don't have nostalgia for the old games, also consider them to be really really fun, so it's really not just because people liked the previous games.
You're kind of missing my point. That's great for the person who is already a Nintendo fan and already plays every Mario game like clockwork.
As a person who hasn't own a Nintendo console in a decade, what would be my incentive to buy one to play Mario? How the heck would I be able to tell that the Nintendo Switch Mario is any different than the ones that came before? If it is in fact different, why the heck isn't it in a different series?
(Of course the answer to that last one is: Nintendo's sales are fueled entirely by nostalgia, so of course they want the Mario or Zelda game on it because it's basically "free sales". People will buy it just because it says Mario on the cover. Which, going back to my first post, I find disgusting.)
So Nintendo is doing a great job (presumably) marketing to people who already love their products, but what reason are they giving a person who doesn't to try out the product?
You keep missing the most important point, which is that these games are very fun. That's the reason for someone who hasn't played a Mario before to pick it up.
> As a person who hasn't own a Nintendo console in a decade, what would be my incentive to buy one to play Mario?
Because it's a lot of fun.
> How the heck would I be able to tell that the Nintendo Switch Mario is any different than the ones that came before?
If you haven't played the ones before, then you don't really have a point for comparison. But in that case, the question doesn't seem meaningful at all. Why does it matter that it's different than the previous games, as long as it's fun? You certainly don't have to buy the latest console just to play Mario, you could buy an older console in order to play the older games. Or you could buy the latest console and then pick up older games on the Virtual Console. That said, if you're going to start with Mario (or Zelda or any other Nintendo IP), it's never a bad idea to go with the latest, then if you like it you can pick up the older games. Of course, if you're playing games from older platforms, the visuals won't be as good as the more recent ones. And you may also find that they're not quite as polished as the later ones, because they learn from their older games so that way each new one is better. Most notably, the current level design philosophy they have with Mario started with Super Mario Galaxy 1 (and refined in 2 and then Super Mario 3D Land), so the older games will feel a little different (info about this level design philosophy can be found in this interview - http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/168460/the_structure_o...). And of course there's an obvious important difference between the 2D Mario games and the 3D Mario games.
> If it is in fact different, why the heck isn't it in a different series?
Why? It's not radically different, every Mario game has a lot of commonalities (though each new game tends to introduce something new to the formula). And just in general, why throw away an IP that millions of people love? There's literally no upside to doing that.
Also, if we consider Zelda instead of Mario, even though each Zelda game is a brand new story, they're all connected to each other (a timeline of all games through Skyward Sword can be found from the book Hyrule Historia, or at https://zeldawiki.org/images/7/7c/Timeline_Hyrule_Historia.j...). But there are also really big differences between the games. As one example, The Wind Waker takes place on a series of islands scattered across a large sea, and you have a boat (that talks) that you literally sail from island to island, and with a lot of related mechanics around that. Compare that with the other Zelda games, where every other game takes place mostly on land without any sailing (except for Phantom Hourglass, which was a direct sequel to Wind Waker). Similarly, almost every game follows an entirely different character, but each character is basically a reincarnation of the Hero Of Time (Link).
Nintendo has had the 'not many games' story for decades. Third party titles have rarely been a big part of the story for Nintendo. They still have in excess of $1mm in revenue per employee last time I checked.
And, if you subtract minecraft on Xbox, my kids spend 95% of their non-mobile gaming time on Wii U. No third party title time.
At any rate, I'm guessing it's when not if Switch will hit our house. Maybe I can hide it in my bag for a while before they find it. :)
Try looking at it the other way, this isn't the next wiiU trying to compete with sony and MS. This is the next 3DS which also supports big screen gaming. Nintendo is bringing their strengths (mobile and third party mobile support) into the arena they've been struggling with on and off since the SNES era.
> From the beginning it emphasises mobility with a (hopefully good!) smartphone app to manage online/local wifi matches…
Actually, this has me very worried. Putting down the controller and pulling out a smartphone to manage my online matches seems about the worst possible user interaction they could think of. No matter how good this smartphone app is (and really, is it going to be good?), it's going to pale in comparison to just selecting a menu on the console.
The fact that they said this at all makes me think they still haven't figured out online interactions. Microsoft and Sony have them down pat, all Nintendo really has to do is just copy them. But instead they're trapped in their own bizzaro world for some reason.
The underlying content was good, and they did well with the Zelda launch date announcement, but to praise the whole presentation as masterful, I'm not so sure. It was extremely awkward throughout.
>> But the marketing and presentation was honestly textbook.
I don't know if anyone else noticed but I thought this presentation would have played better if it had been done with a western live audience because of cultural differences. The Japanese audience was very polite and seemed fairly quiet throughout the presentation. If it was done in front of western fans, there would have been continuous eruptions of raucous applause during each of the game presentations (much like an Apple event).
I believe Dragon Quest XI is also for 3DS. They've announced DQXI localization for both 3DS and PS4, but during the switch presentation said that DQXI and DQX would be Japanese only so far. Dragon Quest Warriors I and II will be localized for the Switch, however. At least there's no region locking!
I'm not a games fun by any means, but one of my fav titles is Zelda. I was a bit concerned when I didn't see Zelda appear right after "Super Mario", I thought they didn't bother to create a title and was kinda disappointed until 1h 35m in :D
But it does come with two. Sure they not two dual-analogues, but you can play two-player Mario Kart with the pair of Joy-Cons (urgh, naming) that come with the system.
Essentially, they placed value squarely in the face of everything your PC/enthusiast-level gaming rig won't ever replace. The ability to pick up and play elsewhere. Like the Wii, it's not even trying to compete with the current crop of consoles. It's value proposition will be placed somewhere a bit obtusely, between your mobile phone and everything else you leave at home. Yes, this obviously functions as a home console as well, but I can't help but suspect Nintendo absolutely meant to go for what makes handhelds great. If any company can do it, they can. So what if it cannibalises their current 3DS offerings? Pokemon seems to be going strong with its fanbase.
The whole presentation, from the demonstration of the hardware to especially the finishing trademark "One more thing!" with Zelda making a predictable but nonetheless amazing launch date. It's a strategy that worked wonders for the Wii, remember, so why not?
Nintendo absolutely killed it, and I'll be keeping a really close eye on this thing. But the marketing and presentation was honestly textbook.
[1] https://youtu.be/uuC4YLLkqME?t=33m20s