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Topic: Some smartphones match the power of the Switch (and that's a good thing)

Posts 61 to 80 of 94

MFD

@StuTwo What makes you think they'll ditch the disk drive? Last I checked, it's the Switch that would need two cart-ridges for certain games due to limited memory or unwillingness to use more expensive memory cards, which, I'm pretty sure, isn't the case for disks.

So what I'm taking from all this, is that taking the time to sit down for a good game might as well be outlawed by the pace of tech? What's next, we attach bars to consoles to force people to be on the move while playing them? I don't like this whole "portable world" you lot are constantly talking about.

MFD

NEStalgia

@MFD When they ditch it they're going digital only. I'm not a fan of that direction (at all), and I'm certain it's not happening (at least for Sony, Microsoft is a different issue) with this next generation, but it's exceedingly obvious they'd like to go the digital-only direction. I wouldn't doubt Microsoft may force it on the X2. Cloud is Microsoft's corporate centerpiece, and the X1X already forces >50GB downloads even for retail titles. Ultimately MS wants parity with Windows, and Windows games are nearly 100% download now. Publishers aren't putting full games on BD anymore either. And nobody wants to spend on BD DL. Sony has more interest in keeping the retail footprint based on their distribution partners for now (stores don't care about selling hardware, it's the games and accessories that net them revenue), and to better compete with Nintendo in Japan. Sony/MS may diverge a bit as MS clearly wants to shed the traditional console paradigm. PSPGo was ahead of its time, but, I don't think they'll be pushing games on cartridges for those platforms much as I'd like to see them do so. They'll just go with downloads. Maybe with empty retail boxes with a paper download code inside, like most PC games (I'll probably stop playing consoles all together once that happens, it's grotesque....but...that's where they seem to want to go.) I can't imagine them keeping the optical drives for more than another generation even though I wish they would.

I don't think they're going to outlaw good games. What I do expect is they'll force us all, one way or another, to adopt digital distribution or streamed games (such as OnLive) (eventually, not with the current grid), and that the gap in performance between mobile architectures and commodity fixed architecture will become irrelevant for consumer products including gaming to the point that the mass market will take the more convenient form factor (hybrids) over whatever "power" is offered by fixed devices. By the point in time we're talking your phone will be more performent than the current X1X. After that most consumers won't care that a wired box "is prettier."

Being portable isn't inherently bad. I did the whole PC Master Race "haha consumers buy trash hardware, look at my awesome rig!" thing for a long time. What do I mostly play now? Switch. Sometimes docked, sometimes just flopped on the couch holding the portable, or sometimes roaming with it. It's convenient. Just like with MP3s vs. vinyl, or even CDs, convenience always wins in consumer space. But in 2017 there IS a tradeoff of ideal performance vs. portability. But that tradeoff is far less than it was 10 years ago when a DS and PSP was the best a handheld could do while PCs were running Fallout 3. And 10 years from now that tradeoff will be much less again when something like a Switch is running something that makes Witcher 3 look old and dated. It's not about whether you like the portable world. It's about if even you will care if a device is portable or not if it's doing what you want it to do. Take an X1X, shrink it, shove a battery in it, mount a 4k OLED screen to it and stick an HDMI dock in the box.....would you care that it was portable? You could still use it the way you want.

NEStalgia

Matt_Barber

Solid state storage prices keep dropping and capacities keep going up. Give it another five years and neither optical media nor mechanical hard drives will offer any great cost savings over them, at which point all consoles can get much much smaller.

The Switch is just a bit ahead of the curve, hence you've got to pay a price premium for both large games on cartridge and additional SD storage. Five years down the line though, all games will come on 64GB cartridges whether they need it or not, and the base model will have 512GB of flash on board. Oh, and people will still be complaining that it's not enough.

Matt_Barber

MFD

@NEStalgia We'll see by then. The current Switch is far from there yet, and we can still go in all directions. If the market shifts away from home-consoles entirely, then I doubt the docked part of the hybrid will survive at all.

MFD

NEStalgia

@Matt_Barber Well, going by X1X most games will be over 100GB by then!

@MFD Absolutely, Switch has the "early adopters" fee attached. It's like buying a first gen iPhone or those early Sandisk MP3 players before the iPod made bulk storage popular. Jumping in early usually costs in features, price tag, or both. But it's a footprint in the sand that I imagine will grow.

I don't think the dock will die off. It's the versatility of being usable in any configuration rather than being chained to just portable or just docked that makes the form factor popular for Switch, and laptops alike. If you couldn't plug in keyboards, mice, and monitors, laptops would be a lot less popular.

NEStalgia

Matt_Barber

@NEStalgia They'll only be that big on the Switch if it's got a 4K screen by that point. Either way, I won't complain.

Matt_Barber

skywake

@MFD
I think you're struggling with the idea that hardware will continue to improve. The Switch as a concept wouldn't have worked a few years ago. It only works now because mobile hardware is improving faster than the spec consumers demand is. As that trend continues eventually those lines will intersect. That's just how it is.

Some playlists: Top All Time Songs, Top Last Year
"Don't stir the pot" is a nice way of saying "they're too dumb to reason with"

skywake

MFD wrote:

@StuTwo What makes you think they'll ditch the disk drive? Last I checked, it's the Switch that would need two cart-ridges for certain games due to limited memory or unwillingness to use more expensive memory cards, which, I'm pretty sure, isn't the case for disks.

Optical media and mechanical HDDs is technically inferior to cartridges and flash in pretty much every single way except one. Cost per GB. And on both counts the "traditional" HDD and ODD combo is losing ground. Especially when you again consider the increasing gap between what hardware can deliver and what people actually use.

To put it in perspective the biggest cartridges on the DS were about 1/100th of the size of a PS3 disk. With the Switch the biggest cartridges as of today are about 2/3rds of the size of a PS4 disk. And if you think I'm fudging the figures there an average sized DS game was about 1/130th of the size of a Wii disk. An average sized Switch game is about 1/6th of the size of a PS4 disk.

Again, what the Switch is would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. All I'm saying is as these trends continue eventually it'll become the norm. Eventually we'll get to the point where a portable system will have good enough specs that it won't make sense not to be portable.

Some playlists: Top All Time Songs, Top Last Year
"Don't stir the pot" is a nice way of saying "they're too dumb to reason with"

MFD

@skywake And I again believe you underestimate the people who play those "boring PC boxes" right now. There's still plenty of people that want those, as shown by the sales numbers. That, and you completely dodged the question of price here. Size is great 'n all, but it matters literally nothing if companies skimp anyway and use smaller sized ones at consumers cost.

Just the idea that we'd all have tiny machines sitting around because nobody can be bothered to put genuine effort in their machines anymore, and just blindly follow this new portable world you talk about truly disturbs me. What's next, you predict Nintendo will enforce a "Must take Switch on the go at least 15 hours per week" in their TOS?

MFD

StuTwo

MFD wrote:

@StuTwo What makes you think they'll ditch the disk drive? Last I checked, it's the Switch that would need two cart-ridges for certain games due to limited memory or unwillingness to use more expensive memory cards, which, I'm pretty sure, isn't the case for disks.

Didn't you just say that you game on PC? When was the last time you actually bought a PC game on disc? Does anyone still buy physical discs for PC games or do they just download from Steam?

The largest Switch cartridges will have a much bigger capacity than standard BluRay discs by the end of this generation. They might cost more (slightly) and have other implications for publishers but the technology is more than poised to overtake and lap optical discs from a performance point of view very soon.

That some publishers don't want to pay extra for a larger cart is for reasons other than technical reasons. In some ways they're simply being honest - in a day of vast mandatory day 1 patch downloads the finished game isn't on the disc/cart anyway. The disc/cart is just a copy protection key - the actual game is a download.

This is a concept that Microsoft especially are silently implementing and the obvious end game for that is that you ditch the disc drive altogether.

So what I'm taking from all this, is that taking the time to sit down for a good game might as well be outlawed by the pace of tech? What's next, we attach bars to consoles to force people to be on the move while playing them? I don't like this whole "portable world" you lot are constantly talking about.

No - you're not reading my posts. Manufacturers will still make SKU's designed for use exclusively in the home. Developers will still design games that are really meant to be played for hours at a time on a TV.

It's just that those consoles will be designed in such a way that their architecture will allow for a completely compatible handheld version to easily exist alongside those SKU's.

Your complaints are like someone in 2007 being told that 10 years from now everyone will have a torch built into their their phone (because they need a light for the camera anyway so it's functionality that might as well be offered) and snapping back "I don't want a torch on my phone - I have a big torch already and that's better. No one should have a torch on their phones because then the market for big torches will go away".

Then there's commercial and marketing reality.

The worldwide console market across a whole generation (5 years) is for somewhere in the region of 200 million units. The market for tablets is for 200 million units every year. If you have a home console that has insides small enough that you could conceivably slap a screen on one side and a battery on the other then you will be under immense pressure from your marketing and sales departments to do so because it increases you market potential by 500%.

And that's before you start to consider that a good handheld console capable of operating as a tablet might also be considered as an alternative purchase to a new high end phone...

StuTwo

Switch Friend Code: SW-6338-4534-2507

MFD

@StuTwo A digital only world is a frightening one, lest we forget that Nintendo happily, and usually, skimps on internal memory. I'd rather SOMEONE of the big-3 still has physical be a thing for as long as possible.

And as I've said before, the way you're putting all this feels like the home-console TV experience will disappear because people demand everything be adapted to their whims. I just don't want to lose my home-console experience because other people clamour for something like a hybrid. The Switch already does plenty of this, divide people into camps because it's more handheld than home-console which impacts home-console users in a negative way, which is why I don't see this as "A step in the right direction, to be refined" but a wrong move that should immediately be abolished from history.

MFD

StuTwo

MFD wrote:

@StuTwo A digital only world is a frightening one, lest we forget that Nintendo happily, and usually, skimps on internal memory. I'd rather SOMEONE of the big-3 still has physical be a thing for as long as possible.

You'll probably see Nintendo stick with it for longest because of the way they sell their games and the way they have the least investment in online gaming. Also because they've already cut the cord from optical discs in favour of game cards.

Eventually even they are likely to go all in for digital too though.

And as I've said before, the way you're putting all this feels like the home-console TV experience will disappear because people demand everything be adapted to their whims. I just don't want to lose my home-console experience because other people clamour for something like a hybrid.

You don't need to worry - what you're afraid of is simply not going to happen. As long as people want a home console experience that's what they'll get. The home console experience isn't just about bleeding edge technology though (which seems to be one of your misconceptions). Game design and interface are the bigger points and so long as developers continue to develop games along traditional home console design principles you'll still have the same experience sat at home.

It's just that as time goes by there won't be any need to sacrifice anything substantial to have a handheld in the same format. The difference in graphical performance 5-10 years from now will eventually become so small that only a tiny enthusiast market will care/have the TVs capable of demonstrating the differences.

The Switch already does plenty of this, divide people into camps because it's more handheld than home-console which impacts home-console users in a negative way,

It doesn't impact home-console only users in a negative way though. They're getting games on Switch that never would have been released on Wii U and feeling the benefits of Nintendo focusing all of their development resources on a single platform.

which is why I don't see this as "A step in the right direction, to be refined" but a wrong move that should immediately be abolished from history.

Then you're a Luddite. The exact route and destination can change but the overall direction of travel is pretty clear.

Edited on by StuTwo

StuTwo

Switch Friend Code: SW-6338-4534-2507

skywake

MFD wrote:

And I again believe you underestimate the people who play those "boring PC boxes" right now. There's still plenty of people that want those, as shown by the sales numbers. That, and you completely dodged the question of price here.

I didn't underestimate the popularity of higher spec devices now and I didn't dodge the question of cost. Because I haven't really been talking about tech as it is today in 2017 in this thread. Every single post I have made in this thread has been about long term trends in tech. Every time you talk about how things are today in response to what I'm saying? You're missing the point entirely.

For example earlier on this page you made a comment about how cartridges have limitations compared to discs. And they do, I agree, I never said I didn't. My actual counter point was that the gap between the two continues to shrink. Here's a graph that shows exactly that:
Untitled

Also that games these days aren't pushing the limits in terms of storage like they used to. In the late 90s it wasn't at all unheard of for a game to come on several disks. Especially on the original Playstation. Currently the biggest game installed on my HDD is Doom at 67GB. Which isn't that big when according to the above graph we should (and do) have 100GB discs and are only a couple of years away from 64GB cartridges.

That's the sort of thing I'm talking about when I say the days of large consoles are numbered. Every single trend is pushing what can be done on mobile devices closer to what high end machines can do. At the same time we're demanding less and less from our high end machines. Those lines will eventually converge.

Edited on by skywake

Some playlists: Top All Time Songs, Top Last Year
"Don't stir the pot" is a nice way of saying "they're too dumb to reason with"

Anti-Matter

@MFD
" The Switch already does plenty of this, divide people into camps because it's more handheld than home-console which impacts home-console users in a negative way "

Negative what ??
Portability is the Best Option for gamers to enjoy the games anywhere, anytime.
No More sitting on the couch with machine attached to TV Forever. Why did you think playing with Giant TV , without pirtability is the best of all ?
Console or Handheld ? Who cares !
They are SAME video games with Different way to play. What are you afraid of being NOT playing with TV ? Will it lose your Pride as a gamer ?
That was like you were debating between Fried Noodle and Ramen Noodle, even they are same Noodle dishes but with different way of cook.

Anti-Matter

MFD

@Anti-Matter Opinions lad, 2 different groups of people that want different things out of their machines. Someone who looks for a PS4/Xbox One wants other things out of their machine than someone who looks for a 3DS does. The Switch is more 3DS than it is PS4/Xbox One.

@skywake Very well, but that mobile architecture can still be put in a traditional box that can then be enhanced with more power. More memory, etc. I see no reason to believe that everyone will demand that their games HAVE to be portable, there's far too many PS4/Xbox One owners for that.

@StuTwo I may come across as a luddite, but only because what I see right now of the Switch frightens me. I see a handheld concept done great, probably best it can be save for battery, etc, and a negligible accessory that has it qualify as "home-console". I understand the part of converged development, I get the need for the hybrid to be there, but at the same time the Switch current just isn't balanced in that regard. Sure, in the future that could be, but I'm not a future-kind of person, I'm a here and now person and here and now I've got a hard time imagining the Switch matching the competition, since it's a while behind both PS4 and Xbox One.

MFD

Octane

@MFD Diminishing returns. There will be a point when more 'power' or 'memory' yields no visible differences. Then what's the point?

Octane

MFD

@Octane I can see that, but at that point we're at a frightening point to begin with, since then both Sony and Microsoft are at the end so to speak.

MFD

Octane

@MFD It's getting closer every generation. I still think we've got one or two left, but after that? Does an increase in power still matter? How long would it even take to develop a game that utilises all of that power?

Octane

link3710

@MFD The fact that mobile architecture can be put in a box is exactly why we're excited. That means that mobile solutions like the Switch and home like the PS4 will be incredibly easy to port between.

link3710

MFD

@link3710 There's an argument I can get behind.

MFD

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