Topic: The cost to Switch...

@JaxonH Yeah, Pikmin is definitely a franchise that plays a lot better with motion controls. I hope that the gyro controls are just as responsive as the IR pointer in the Wii Remote.

@Octane
Well I can say that I use gyro in the STEAM CONTROLLER to aim in Half Life 2 and I'm like Billy the Kid with that thing.

And I imagine the Joycon are more advanced than the STEAM CONTROLLER

@JaxonH Yeah I loved aiming with the GamePad in Splatoon, but the only memory of controlling a pointer with gyro controls is from Skyward Sword, it felt so slow and sluggish in that game. I have no doubt that it'll be better this time, but I do know that the IR pointer was 1:1 with the controls. So I'm hoping that gyro controls have reached the same level of fidelity.

I was wondering, the joy cons come with a grip when you buy the switch. A pro controller is 70$, two additional joy cons are 80$, but I guess you need to buy another grip for those joycons - right?

BestBuy has $25 off $100 purchase with VISA checkout, can use on Switch games and accessories and amiibo, so long as there's a release date for the items in question (otherwise it says CC expires too soon to release date)

@Andrzej777 You technically don't need the grip, but if you want another one, yes you need to buy a second grip.

I know there has been a lot of talk that 1-2-Switch should have been bundled, but personally I am glad it isn't because (a) it doesn't increase the price and (b) it doesn't look like the sort of game I'd be interested in so I don't really want it forced on me.

(Don't get me wrong, from all the videos I have seen about 1-2-Switch it looks impressive from a technical standpoint, the HD rumble feature, etc., but it doesn't look like much of a game. Or at least not something that would come out on a regular basis. More like something you might play with at a theme park if you follow me.)

When looking at the prices it is also worth remembering that for many of the multiplayer games you have everything you will need in the box, i.e. 2 players can play using a Joycon each. Street Fighter 2, Mario Kart, Fast RMX can all be played this way off the top of my head. I'm positive that FIFA will include a 2 player mode for play on Joycons too.

XB1 and PS4 controllers start at £42.99 and let's not even mention the price of an XB1 Elite controller!

Some people have also talked about "hidden" costs, e.g. micro SD card expansions. To be honest, PS4 and XB1 are practically unusable without buying hard drive upgrades that are far more expensive than micro SD cards. So how's that for hidden costs?

I've upgraded my PS4 to a 2 tb drive and my XB1 to a 1 tb drive. The fact that both consoles require games that you own on physical media to be installed to the hard drive before you can play them is, frankly ludicrous.

well, technically I wouldnt buy the joy cons at all. I will go for the pro controller once I purchase the switch. Its just another thing that popped into my mind. If you want additional joy cons and want to put them together so as to have a proper second controller to give to your wife or whoever you feel like, well than its additional money. And that really puts me off.

Look, dont get me wrong, I am a nintendo fan. I will not buy sony or ms. Reasons for this, are the the wholehearted feeling that I get out of nintendo games, and thats it. But if I see things are going the wrong way I mention it. THats my opinion. I am not going to say its fine when I think its not. The price for the switch might be OK - I dont care about the ps4 or xbone being cheaper while providing better specs or something. To me its about overpriced accessories, overpriced games, hidden costs that push the investment a lot higher. Not everyone can afford that. I could but felt shortchanged supporting a company that produces amazing games but doesnt truly care about its fanbase, provides cheap service and wants to milk you out of every dollar possible, like when they released the snes new 3ds titles. I would have liked to play a link to the past on the 3ds, but why should I pay for it again? Of course, its consumers choice, but I think its disgustingly stingy by nintendo to charge for the same game again and again and what have you. So I just voice my opinion and try to make people aware that buying this, potentially great console, day one, will send the wrong message to nintendo. Nintendo is great in regard to some things they are doing, but not all things, not most things. They disappointed with the wii u and abandoned it with dishonor. Now they are coming back, playing the topdog, charging top prices, I dont think its fair.

I dont own either xbox or ps4. But from what I understand you dont have to buy additional hd drives. You just dont keep all game updates on the drive, just the saves if you want to come back at a later time. If you want to keep a lot of digital games on the switch, well...
Of course nobody forces you to keep all the digital games you own at the same time. IMHO 32gb in 2017 thats way below the limit. At least they could have added an additional 32gb microsd card and what not.

The Dualshock 4 is $65 here, and that's the main controller of the PS4. So yeah, I don't get the griping either.

The worst thing here, that comes to my mind is even not not the ridiculous prices they want us to pay. What I fear is, that this is just another gimmick that will not be utilized in a meaningful way at all. Right now they are telling people how great it is. But the same thing happened with the wii u game pad. So awesome, so expensive (actually the gamepad made the heavily underpowered wii u so expensive) and what did they do with the gamepad? Nothing really. In the end they admitted that the gamepad doesnt work. Something that a lot of people realized when they first saw it. So not everything nintendo does is great, they have an idea that might work or might not work, but they sell it to you and you have to pay for it. In the end I cannot say that the gamepad mattered at all.
The switch will be no different, IMHO the best and most memorable games will be played with the pro controller - everything else will be a gimmick that is fun to watch or try one time or two and be forgotten.

It seems like a fair price if you ask me.

@xXTrollBasherXx

much fairer if it goes down (A LOT)

Do like me and split the purchase with a family member or girlfriend/boyfriend, bam, half price

That's why i don't have issues with the price.

@Andrzej777 the reason the gamepad didn't work out is the fault of Nintendo who didn't release anything that would have worked better on it. Why didn't we get more tactical and/or strategy games for example? A civ or city builder would have broken new grounds for consoles. Or point and click adventures or really anything that usually requires a mouse.

Nintendo are sometimes to afraid to test new things, and sometimes to bold with some ideas. I think they went into tail spin when they realized U wouldn't sell as much as they thought and therefore got more conservative when they should have tried and be more bold.

But this is the price people need to pay to have an handheld of this caliber. It was obvious it would be weaker and more expensive than an ordinary console. It is just logic which has been explained time and time again. If anything, if we look what is in it, it isn't overpriced. Having two joy-cons instead of them being fused to the console adds cost, likewise is having 2 more expensive than having one ordinary controller since you need to duplicate some hardware.

Fun fact, the MSRP is the same for the switch, the Xbox One S and ps4 Slim. The difference is down to each and every retailer.

I totally understand what you mean. To me its like they had an idea wchich was theoreticall and they didnt really put into practice themselves. Now its a little bit similar, they bring out simething whicg costs a lot, people are meant to but it and in the end it may turn out to not have been such a good idea. Imagine they would have brought out something like the ps4 with s proper controller, would anyone have complained?

@rsbrowndog No, please. I have a 1TB PS4, and it's far from being filled, and I probably don't ever need to upgrade my HDD. It's definitely not mandatory. Also, £40 on Amazon gets me a 128GB micro SDxc card, or 500GB of HDD for even less than that.

The reason that you need to install your games is because optical media can't keep up with the amount of data that needs to read in order to render the games. Mark my words, PS5 will have cartridges.

For me the $300 (USD) cost of the console itself doesn't bother me so much. It's a little more than I'd like, but I'm okay with it. The real issue for me is the cost of 1-2-Switch, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, the accessories, expanding the storage, and the potential cost of online services.

I actually saw 1-2-Switch and thought it looked cool, but I expected it would be either a pack-in demo (initially missed that little text at the bottom of the trailer) or an affordable title anyone could afford. I should have known would be neither. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is tempting, but as a Wii U owner that already owns the game, $60 is very hard to stomach. I'm just not going to buy it again at that price. I could add ARMS as well. I just haven't seen enough of the game to know whether there's actually $60 worth of content there.

Then the accessory prices look kind of nuts. To start, that a charging grip doesn't come with the system is disappointing. $30 isn’t expensive, but for something that just passes power, it seems overpriced. That one doesn’t bother me too much though. Then, I didn't plan on it right away, but at $90 it looks like buying an extra dock is almost out of the question now—just not worth that kind of money for what it is. But again, not too bothered.

The controllers are a different story. I play local multiplayer on my Wii U all the time with 3 to 4 people. Some of those games would have me pay at least $210 in controllers to do that on Switch! That's crazy! And I’d rather buy Joy-Cons, but that’s more expensive! 3 Joy-Cons costs $240, and with grips $330! This is slightly alleviated by simpler games that can be played on one Joy-Con, but I don't see those being adequate for games like Minecraft or Smash Bros. And maybe if lucky, enough people (unlike the Wii U) will buy a Switch, and they'll have their own Joy-Cons. I’ve bought 3 controllers for just about every console I’ve owned. That’s never meant spending more than around $180 tops. For the Wii it was around $150. The Switch might just be too much. I could probably still afford it, but at those prices along with so many other costs with this system, I’m just not sure it’s worth it anymore. I’ll probably get one extra pair and nothing more.

Then there's the fact I buy digital titles. It looks like the 32GB will last me a while, but a year out I'll inevitably be buying a MicroSD card, at which point I have to decide on cheap but inadequate storage, or 256GB cards that cost almost as much as the Switch itself. 3DS games were small, and the Wii U let me plug in a spare 2TB drive. Storage on the Switch will be far pricier.

I also worry about the online fee. I won't even buy a Switch until Nintendo answers this question. If it's in the range of PSN and Xbox Live, it better justify that with a strong feature set and not requiring a smartphone app to use half the service. The smartphone app actually sounds cool, but the Switch itself needs to do more than the 3DS and Wii U did. If we're talking about a small fee, say $20 to $40, I won't stress as much over it. What “deals” are available to subscribers could help too.

As it stands, the only “must buys” on the Switch for me are The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a game also releasing on a console that I already own, and Super Mario Odyssey, a game that doesn’t come until the end of the year. Super Bomberman R, Snipperclips: Cut It Out, Together!, Splatoon 2, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and Project Octocat Traveler all have my interest, but they aren’t enough for me to buy the system just yet, especially on launch day as most of those won’t come for many months later.

I like the Switch. I’m sure the moment I see games like Pikmin, Animal Crossing, Metroid, or a Gamefreak Pokémon I’ll be sold on it completely. If I do buy it at launch, it would really just be a Zelda machine, and that’s not necessarily so bad, especially for this particular Zelda. I’d definitely enjoy taking it on the go. But I’m still weary of all these costs. Hopefully Nintendo starts explaining how more of this platform will work soon.

I own both a PS4 and an XB1, so I speak from experience. Every game installs to the hard drive, including physical disc-based games. Really annoying to buy a new game and stick in the disc only to sit and wait for it to finish installing before you can play it. And there's usually a patch to download that also goes on the hard drive.

(Not small patches either, the other day my PS4 downloaded a 6.7 Gb patch for Assassin's Creed Unity - yes, half the size of Breath of the Wild on Switch!)

Of course you can delete games to free up space to install and play something else, but that soon gets tiresome. If you have a library bigger than 6 or 7 games on PS4 and play them all fairly regularly then you HAVE to upgrade your hard drive. And if you own games digitally then you are looking at some very hefty downloads if you delete a game and want to reinstall it.

@BiasedSonyFan
Idk, it would take quite a bit of thinking on how exactly to arrange it all. Probably Arms and either Dragon Quest XI or the DQ Heroes 1/2 bundle. Plus there's a lot of games that are releasing this spring/summer that don't have a release date. You'd really have to have insider knowledge to know when these games are truly releasing to know how to pace them.

But I do think having a game like Mario Kart at launch would help. Still, it won't take long for the games to stack up. It seems like instead of dumping all the games at once they're using that catch-up time they had to ensure they can slip games in between the cracks and plug all the gaps to ensure there's no long droughts. Which in the end I think is the right move