Topic: Current Switch 2 line-up not good enough?

@FishyS be fair, we're all desperate for more Animal Crossing.

I'd think that we're at the point where the inter-generational improvement in graphical capabilities is starting to look like more of a hop than a leap; the amount of processing power still goes up, but most of it doesn't make a huge amount of difference in terms of what the player, sat on their sofa, can perceive.

Both Xbox and PlayStation fans experienced a thoroughly underwhelming transition five years ago, where most games still came out on older hardware looking OK, and now it's Nintendo's turn.

Still, I suppose it's worth asking the question whether Nintendo needed to make the Switch 2 a $450 device when it could probably be another $350, without much in the way of discernible differences in the quality of games it could be run, one if they'd been prepared to cut a few corners with the spec.

It's clearly not had much of a negative impact in terms of hardware sales so far, but we're still waiting for some vindication for the decision to go with a 120fps screen that extends much beyond 2D platformers. Maybe time will tell.

I would say that for most games the gap between Switch and Switch 2 spec tiers is mostly one of image quality and performance. There are some games still that push further but there wasn't much that couldn't fit into the Switch spec. Generally the limitation for games in this era is budget and scope not hardware

But that doesn't mean there isn't value in revising the hardware. Switch 2 is $700AU, Switch OLED is $540AU, non-OLED $470AU. You can get a 256GB Steam Deck for $520AU currently (there's a sale, usually it's $650AU) and the OLED for $900AU. I would say that the specs of the OG Switch are pretty poor in that landscape. Not at all competitive. But Switch 2 is competitive, arguably not better value, but definitely competitive

I don't think we can with a straight face complain that the Switch generation was too short. And even if we want to I don't think you can say that while also complaining about a cross-gen period. Especially given, as stated, the main difference between what Switch and Switch 2 can do is image quality and performance

Unironically the best argument in support of the thread topic in this thread this far.

@FishyS Read the topic title again. It isn’t “Does Switch 2 have games?”, it’s “Current Switch 2 line-up not good enough?”

That’s what me and others are discussing. And that also implies the Switch 2 specific games line-up, which we’ve been focusing on. The very topic asks a question that will have subjective elements to its answers, so please try to be respectful of that and stay on topic.

I admit talking about the history of Nintendo hardware and mentioning the Deck went a little sideways, but the point I did make was that no software yet highlights its strengths in obvious ways, and its hardware having so few unique aspects over Switch also makes that job harder software-wise.

A bit of a meta comment, but I’m not here to win an argument, as I feel some people may be. There’s no “winning” something like this topic the way I see it; for me it’s a way to explore our differences of opinion.

I mean... that was clearly a joke referencing a common meme combined with a reference to the Switch versus wii u thread which gets famously off topic. I won't pretend it was a good joke, but I did immediately comment on the actual thread topic literally 2 lines later.

As I said, Switch 2 simply has too many good games not available on Switch 1 or running much better than on Switch 1 to afford. Someone not buying Switch 2 until there are a few personal must-buys for them is a totally reasonable decision, but for people who did buy Switch 2 and who don't own a bunch of other expensive gaming devices, Switch 2 is pretty limitless.

If we're talking about the line-up of games for a specific console, I think it's a bit weird to focus only on exclusives, because nowadays (depending on the console) 95–100 % of the games on any console are not exclusives. So if we're talking about the actual line-up of games, we should also talk about the quality of ports and multi-platform releases, of which the Switch 2 has already had a lot of good ones.

Also, only focusing on first-party Nintendo games and other exclusives comes with the implication that the Switch 2 is not your main gaming platform and you're just gonna buy and play any non-exclusive game on another gaming device. But for many of us, the Switch/Switch 2 is our only or primary gaming device. I have a more powerful gaming PC, but if a Switch/Switch 2 version of a game runs well enough, I prefer the convenience and portability of the that version to the higher performance specs of the PC version.

So for people like me, the idea the Switch 2 line-up of is not good enough feels weird, cos 3 months after its release I've already bought about a dozen excellent S2 games, which have given me countless hours of gaming joy. It seems that what the people on the other side of argument are really saying here is not that the Switch 2 has a bad selection of games but that there haven't been enough great/unique first-party titles. Which I can sorta agree with, but it's a different issue than the idea that the Switch 2 simply doesn't have enough good games. It most certainly does.

You keep trying to argue that people aren't discussing the thread topic when they talk about cross gen and multiplatform platform games. To the point where you even get offended by comments made in jest. Except OP specifically listed a bunch of Switch 2 Edition games. So OP was also off topic based on your measure

And in any case, there's no rule against disagreeing with the premise of a thread topic. It's a forum discussion, not a conga-line of seals clapping. Who are you to gatekeep people's posts in this way? People are allowed to disagree with you

To go back to the point I made you got so offended by originally. Does the Steam Deck have a good enough line-up? I would say yes. Without question or debate. And this is despite it, almost by definition, being a machine that lacks exclusives built specifically to target and take advantage of its hardware. As such exclusives are not what makes a platform, the availability of games generally does

Hardware is a vessel to play games. It's the games we buy, it's the games we care about. Cross generation and multiplatform games count just as much to the end user as exclusives do if they haven't already purchased that game

This is some "if everyone else jumped off a building" logic right here. Just because you CAN offer higher specs doesn't mean you SHOULD, higher specs results in higher prices and increasing resources that can negate whatever benefit you gain from making the games look prettier. If you don't have limitation issues, don't make a new console. Limitations are THE reason for new hardware, otherwise you struggle to convince consumers that they need to abandon old hardware in favor of newer hardware.

As far as pricing vs. specs, Nintendo's frequently had success being the budget option on the market. And in this economy, that's something we could really use with everything going up in price. If Nintendo could offer a largely comparable experience for say, half of the price, they'd easily win the value game here. And I really think that's where the Switch 2 should've gone if they needed it to exist. Again, something more of a sidegrade that's largely similar in power to the Switch (maybe a tad more powerful if needed) but also adds something new that they could sell in the $300-$400 range.

That's not even what I'm saying, the Switch lasted a satisfying length of time and got a satisfying amount of games, and there are few things I can think of that it was missing. It's more of an issue of are Switch 2 levels of specs really needed? And that's a difficult argument to make, and even you're admitting that the Switch has little to nothing in terms of hardware limitations.

This is literally every console generation at this point. We're getting to the point where hardware is improving just to improve.

We've just had basically half a decade of people begging for a more powerful Switch.

We finally get it and now the argument is that it was a waste of time to chase power...

If I were to make an argument against Switch 2, beyond the most obvious/reasonable complaints, its that if Nintendo spent 15 years on the same console, I'd be just fine with that. I buy games, not graphics, and even if I do they'll be stylized graphics most AAA developers won't even do.

I don't care how good Switch 2 games look, I'm buying it purely because it has games I won't be able to play on Switch 1. Most people don't either, if they did, they wouldn't have bought Switch in the first place.

Also Switch 1 games aren't 70 dollars except TOTK, objective improvement over caring about graphics in 2025 tbh.

@Buizel They're not necessarily the same groups of people. Nor are they necessarily mutually exclusive either; the 3DS was a more powerful Nintendo DS but that wasn't its unique selling point. It also came with a 3D display and 3D camera with AR, the streetpass system, high customizability in the user interface, had an internet browser and streaming apps at a time when this was genuinely useful to people, etc.

There are already a lot of games that don't run well on the Switch 2. I don't know whether that's due to hardware limitations or poor optimization, but either way, it's concerning to see this early. Sonic Racing, Donkey Kong Bananza, Wild Hearts S, NBA 2K26, and MLB The Show 25 come to mind. Even Pokemon Scarlet stutters in certain conditions.

On the other hand, you have less demanding games that run very well, but they are still only running at 60fps when the modern standard is 120fps when below 4K. How consistently should a handheld be able to hit that mark? I don't know, but at a bare minimum, there should not be any first-party games that stutter or dip below 60fps.

I think we needed more. I personally would have been happy to pay an additional $50 for slightly stronger specs. Higher memory bandwidth may have been enough to make all of these games stable at 60fps. Unfortunately, I'm sure that's easier said than done.

@Bolt_Strike
A hardware enhancement was needed, though. We all know that. Why are we pretending that the last year or so wasn’t rife with worries about the Switch handling anything other than 2D indies? The Switch was struuuuuggling to run newer games, even some of Nintendo’s own games.

I have a feeling the Switch 1 Metroid and Pokemon versions are going to be pretty good examples of that.

The majority of console owners, possibly the vast majority, have little to no idea what 120fps is or what games do it or not.

Edit: let me change that slightly, the majority have no idea or at most have heard it is "good" somewhere, at some point, with no other context, possibly the vast majority have little to no idea.

Agreed. Anything above 60 fps is just for hardcore gamers, and for a few specific genres. I've been playing videogames since 1986, and even I can't see any meaningful difference between 60 and 120 fps.

@kkslider5552000 Thirding this. There's debate on even whether or not the human eye is even capable of perceiving frame rates higher than 60 fps, 120 may be a hard sell to the average person. I could believe needing a slight increase for games needing a bump up to 60 at best, but other than that I don't think resolution or frame rate improvements were really needed.

Even if they don't fully understand what all of the numbers truly mean, there are a lot of consumers who base their impressions on spec sheets. So for marketing purposes it's still important for Nintendo to be competitive on paper.

Splatoon is the only exclusive title I can think of that would actually benefit from 120fps. But to slider's point, I don't think many people realize what that means or what's required to run it. Most servers don't have tick-rates that can send/receive 120fps of data, so the increased frame rate wouldn't be as beneficial as people think when playing online. So anything above 60 typically only matters in SP games, and there aren't that many sweaty SP games that I would care about having 120fps in (not on a handheld anyway).

That said, if we put marketing aside, 60fps is fine for the Switch 2. I just want to see that held consistently. Dipping below, and even having games that run at 30fps max, is jarring and annoying even when it's a casual game.

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes modern games more expensive here. Higher end hardware allows for games to get bigger, it does not demand that they get bigger. I can tell you now as a software developer (not games) the thing that causes us to spend more time and money optimising our software is not the client who has oddles of RAM and massive multi-core CPUs. It's the large clients who are demanding more of our software and, to some degree, clients who run on lower spec hardware

If I build out a new feature and there's an acceptable level of performance on my machine and in UAT at scale? Then my job is done. If the performance is not acceptable then that's another development ticket. Which is time and money. The higher the spec of the target machine and the lower the relative scale the more time I'm building out features and the less time I'm spending optimising performance

The higher spec hardware exists now, it is possible, it is cost effective. It is not a consumer friendly move to continue to sell severely outdated hardware when higher spec hardware is viable. There is no downside for us or Nintendo in them releasing a higher spec SKU. Especially given that, to much complaining in this thread, they are making a point of continuing to support their lower spec SKU where the additional specs are not required

@skywake Supposedly the major issue being cited by game developers is related to higher quality game assets. And from how you're describing it doesn't sound like your work is involved in that process. This is the biggest issue I think, is why is there any need for the assets to become even more detailed? That's what seems to be the biggest waste of time and money here. You can make more powerful hardware sure, but again should you? Why are you shifting to developing for higher spec hardware in the first place? Why is the old hardware "outdated" if the performance is acceptable? You might want to take a step back and analyze why you're doing what you're doing and consider if it's really necessary or beneficial. Because it sure does not seem to be, again it feels more like tech companies artificially pushing you to upgrade to make a buck more than providing any kind of utility in upgrading.