Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

Breath of the Wild is probably the one example of a retail game where it probably would have made sense. Remember the transition from PS3 to PS4 where Sony gave you a "free upgrade" for some of the late PS3 releases to the PS4 version? That wasn't done because the PS4 version was "free" to make. It was done because it gave Sony some good press and gave people more of a reason to buy a PS4.

If you have Breath of the Wild on Wii U now you have no reason to get a Switch. As it stands the only game worth getting on Switch right now is BotW, if you have it on Wii U you already have it and you've tied yourself to that decision. But if buying it on Wii U gave you a copy on the Switch tied to your Nintendo Account? You're not penalised for buying it on Wii U.

The only legit reason I can see for them not doing it is that there's no way to track physical purchases. The only way they could do it for physical releases is if they had the foresight to put a download code in the box. And you just know that the code would end up on eBay. Either that or do what Microsoft tied to do and tie physical purchases to your account, yeah, that went well didn't it! But those problems don't exist with the VC, all of those games are 100% digital.

And this is different from the VC because..... ?

Well there's no way to prove you got Sonic in 1992 and when you did buy it you didn't buy it from Nintendo. So it's not exactly an apples to apples comparison. In terms of what we're "entitled to"? Well sure, 100% Nintendo doesn't have to give us these games we already brought on a new platform. They don't even have to offer a discount. All I'm saying is that it would make a lot of sense if they did offer these games for "free" to the people who already brought them.

What's in it for Nintendo? Three things.
1. It makes purchasing games on the VC more appealing, I'd buy more if I saw them do this
2. It's an incentive to upgrade. If they had done this with SNES games on the 3DS I would have got a New 3DS
3. It's good PR

What do they lose?
1. The money from the people who buy these games again and again....

Hey, so uh... anybody else on the North American eShop notice that I Am Setsuna is suddenly gone?

@rallydefault It's still there. It's just not in the "recent releases" category. You have to search for it.

They really need to add some more categories on the eShop.

Given the prices they charge and how high those releases were on the eShop charts I'm sure they got a RoI. Not as high as the Wii VC obviously which probably does explain why it wasn't as big. But you have to expect that given there were less 3DS and Wii U's sold combined than the Wii by itself. I'm sure the Pokemon releases on the 3DS did fairly nicely but I'm equally as sure that nothing on Wii U broke any records....

You mean the data that showed VC releases consistently outselling everything else on the eShop? Looking at the 3DS eShop and the overall best-selling releases? Seven of the top 10 are VC releases. Mario Kart 7, Super Mario 3D Land and Pokemon Dream Radar are the other 3. Pokemon Yellow is #1.

I mean sure those VC releases were digital only which inflated the numbers on the eShop. But even so, they were not ignored. If the back catalogue didn't matter Link's Awakening wouldn't be above Shovel Knight and Steam World Dig in the charts. The fact that games like NES Remix and the NES Classic also did well is only further proof of that. Nintendo's back catalogue is strong.

In terms of expanding to other platforms? Nintendo isn't going to do that, we know this. And even if they did they'd only do it if they could have some control over how you play them. I can't see them ever putting the VC on mobile because touch screen controls for classic games is a joke. Steam could potentially happen, that could work. But even if they did go that route they would be stupid to not still offer them on their own platform.

I don't know where this theory that the VC is a failure has come from. The only reason it was even slightly broken was because Nintendo put the brakes on during the Wii U era. But Nintendo put the brakes on EVERYTHING during the Wii U era, especially towards the end there. I don't think that's proof of anything.

Nintendo should be resetting its focus after the Wii U. But they shouldn't be throwing away one of the few things that did work on the Wii U.

@skywake Pretty sure Mega Man 6 and Earthbound broke EU sales records on Wii U for their total lifetime sales in the region.

If you know why you get this reply is sarcasm.

I find it interesting that physical games are now registered to you by the Switch itself when you collect MyNintendo points.

The issue is there is no way to verify resale...which is the problem that Microsoft tried to deal with for different reasons and well we know what happened.

I couldnt say why the Wii U had the brakes for VC. I imagine a lot of third party ones were down to licenses, plain and simple, due to resale of ownership and such.

I feel better about the wait for VC and any small upgrade fees because I know the emulators have to be rewritten for this new OS on this new architecture and that takes time and money for R&D. I am okay with that.

I couldnt begin to explain Wii U though. Maybe it was them seeing the third parties say nope to VC and reacting for investors?

We all know at this point third parties are happier to release their back catalog for a higher price than VC with maybe an extra feature. For them, VC id outdated and doesnt make them enough to swim in.

@skywake
Just my opinion mind you but Nintendo seems to have become the former child actor of gaming. We have nostalgia for their games but they have not made the smartest of decisions lately. If they want to battle illegal emulation wouldn't it make sense to provide paying customers what they've been asking for as far as virtual console is concerned? I've made the comment many times over that SNES VC on new 3ds was a money making scheme, on one hand I don't know much about emu bit I do have common sense to know if they wanted to bring SNES to older 3ds models they could have in some way form or fashion. But no, after the VC was announced only for the new models instead of offering the SNES in addition to all other VC platforms they just supported the new 3ds? Why? It's not like everyone who has a original model dropped $200 just to play 25 year old games.

Here's my personal hope, they continue VC soon but it will make the libraries release simultaneously. Want Star Tropics but don't own a WiiU ? That's fine, since it's also available on 3ds and switch.

@Operative2-0
So, Microsoft has gone on record of saying all they have to do to get Xbox 360 games to run is simply repackage the installer as x64. That's it. Thanks to their architecture they are able to do this. It's a benefit to having similar architecture, but with that said, nobody expected this of them and nobody would've held it against them if they charged. This was a choice they made to help sell their new console. A good choice I should add but a choice nonetheless, and not something that should automatically be expected.

With phones, you can buy an album and have it work on your other phone because all of your phones are using the exact same operating system. And you can put an .mp3 on any phone and it'll play fine, without any extra work involved.

Games do not run natively on separate platforms with separate architectures. Particularly when talking about the difference between Wii U (PowerPC) and Switch (ARM). I would love for free games as much as you or the next guy, but I understand that it is not reasonable to expect them to sink millions of dollars and countless manhours constructing and developing emulators that run these games for a new platform, fixing bugs and tweaking framerates and eliminating glitches, filing for licenses and conforming to legal requirements and all this other stuff that goes with it... for free. Because you bought a game once on the Nintendo Wii, and now you get it free for the Wii U, and free for the Switch, and free for the Switch successor, and free for every platform for the next 50 years.

At face value, it's easy to look at what's done on phones with music and media and say "oh well they do it, Nintendo should do it too" but when you start looking at how it's made possible on those platforms, you realize that the compatibility which makes it possible simply do not exist between gaming platforms like Wii U and Switch. Even quick conversion like the x64 installer repackaging on Xbox is not possible.

With all of that said, Nintendo knows that if people are going to buy a game multiple times they're going to have to discount it. Now, they don't have to. But if they don't, they're not going to sell very many VC games. I know for a fact I will not buy the vast majority of games I purchased on Wii U... unless they're discounted. A few I would be willing to pay full price for again (particularly with Switch which could be the last system you ever need to buy them for... being a hybrid it gives you HD play on TV or on the go... why would anyone ever need more than that) but most I'd pass on. Nintendo knows this. The fair approach is (well, I say "fair" as if we're owed anything more than what the game description read when we bought it, which was quite clearly that version only, but I mean fair as in the most reasonable and mutually beneficial approach for all interested parties) to discount games previously purchased, allowing Nintendo to recoup costs of development while also not demanding full price for a game consumers purchased in a previous generation on another console.

@GameOtaku
As someone who has a fully modded 3DS, I can tell you that it took the community years to get SNES games emulated on original 3DS properly, and even now six years into its lifespan it's still sketchy. Some games run better than others and there are issues and bugs... added power of the New 3DS, however, makes for excellent emulation with SNES. Sure, there's a long list of games that will technically run on the OG models, but they're not of the quality that would be able to be sold on a storefront. Some are... but only some. I suppose Nintendo could have experimented and found the handful of games that would still run flawlessly with enough tweaking, but that takes an awful lot of work. And would be spotty with which games would actually see release.

It's not so much that they can't run... it's that they run with great difficulty, and only a portion of them are able to run at the caliber of performance expected when you purchase a game through official channels for a price.

I'm not sure whether or not it has been confirmed yet but I assume that you can register the same physical game on multiple My Nintendo accounts. They are literally just ROM chips so there'd be no way to "check" the game as having been registered. Unless each game has a unique ID, unlikely. I just assumed that's how it works and was the reason why you get less gold coins for physical releases.

And yeah, it's the issue that Microsoft tried to resolve before getting slaughtered by the people who love the grey market. I won't state my opinions on that fiasco because that's a topic for another thread. But in any case, the fact that you can resell physical releases? That's the reason why they can't do any kind of recognition of previous purchases unless you can prove physically you still have the game. Which won't happen on the Switch because there's more than just an architectural jump there. The Switch physically can't read Wii U or 3DS games. So that rules out any kind of simulated BC with games that were released physically.

But as I said, it's not an issue with the VC.

I think you're missing the point. What I'm saying is that there are more ways to make a return on an investment.

Putting Super Mario World on the Switch? That'll sell well even if you give it away "for free" to people who already brought it on Wii U or 3DS. You can call that "free" game a "lost sale" but even with a supposed "lost sale" Nintendo has won some good PR. They have made the consumer more likely to buy other content knowing that those games are less likely to disappear when they buy into the next platform. They also build into the system one more reason for people on the older platforms to buy into the new platform.

With your music example. Originally if you brought music from iTunes it was encoded at 128kbps and tied to your apple device. You couldn't download a song on iTunes and copy it over to your Creative MuVo or whatever. Then in 2009 they changed the way the store worked. All songs were now 256kbps and were DRM free so you could copy them wherever. They made this upgrade apply to all of your existing purchases for no extra. So no, music purchased from digital stores was not always as open as that.

And another thing with the comparison to phones. What's the one main reason why people don't move between iOS to Android? Their purchase history. They have apps tied to their account that they want to carry to their next phone. With consoles not having any purchases carry over? There's no reason why I can't treat a new console generation as a reason to jump ship. This is why backwards compatibility existed on consoles and carrying over digital purchases does the same thing.

@JaxonH
I'm really starting to think hobby modders think everything needs more power (right Scotty?). The SNES only ran off a 3.5 MHz processor. The 3ds has 134mhz for its processor since one is reserved for OS. Honestly is everyone blind or stupid?! Ocarina of time 3D ran off of that, so did shovel knight and smash bros with no issues or slowdown or hiccups. Now you will say but those run natively, who cares for a processor that runs laps around the SNES it should not have any problems running 25 year old games. Official emulators like the VC run better than any modded emulator correct.

My point however was to just support all VC and just release across the board 3ds, WiiU and switch that way they can still support all 3 platforms. All they are doing is getting ROMs and duming them, they are getting paid well for doing very little work. There should not be a trickle of releases. They should be working to fight illegal emulation by giving the consumer what they want. It would work out better for everyone, third parties would receive compensation from licensing and sales split with Nintendo and consumers could legally purchase games that are going for astronomical prices like Earthbound and Castlevania Legends.

@GameOtaku
That's because it does.

Ocarina of Time was a completely separate game, developed ground up for 3DS. That's called a port. It took years to develop. Not the same game as the N64 version. That was NOT emulation. Shovel Knight and Smash were developed specifically for the 3DS architecture. That's called "3DS games"

Emulation is different.

To emulate a system you must also emulate the hardware it was running on... that's... why it's called emulation.

It's why the 3DS can't run N64 games, not a single one. It's why PC powerful enough to run PS4 games struggle to emulate even N64 or GameCube games.

Typically to emulate a system you must have at least 10 times the power, and that's just a general rule of thumb. Often times you need much more than that.

Please educate yourself further before calling others stupid, because it only reveals your own lack of understanding.

@JaxonH
Math lesson 3.5 times 10 is 35. Still has enough your argument is invalid.

@GameOtaku
Please, please do some research. My argument is perfectly valid because it's reality. Every single system is different because every system has different architecture, and will therefore have to simulate every last bus and chip of the original system hardware in a different way

You need at least a 3 GHz CPU processor for perfect SNES emulation. You don't know what you're talking about

http://www.tested.com/tech/gaming/2712-why-perfect-hardware-s...

@JaxonH
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V-a1IaNX2Ls

Tell that to this guy. Oh and the new 3ds doesn't even have 3ghz of power so obviously we are all sharing a collective hallucination.

@GameOtaku
I said perfect emulation, and that's on PC. Did you even read the article linked? Says right there and bright bold letters You could technically emulate with a 300 MHz processor, but with tons of bugs and glitches

Which is exactly what we see with old 3DS emulation!

Somebody please educate this guy cause I'm done

You can't compare power simply by comparing the number of Hz. As it stands the 3DS is about as powerful as an average desktop PC in the late 90s/early 2000s. Machines which would have had significantly "more Hz" but weren't as efficient with how they were used. That's the yardstick. But even so, it doesn't work like that. Also as others have said emulation does require a significantly larger amount of horsepower than the original system. So it's a moot point anyways.

The issue with SNES emulation specifically is that you could put co-processors in the cartridges. A lot of games did. That adds complexity ontop of the emulation of the standard SNES. It's the reason why the Wii never got games like Yoshi's Island. And the Wii was significantly more capable than the 3DS is. It's also why they're so quick to release games like Super Mario World and F-Zero on the VC and why we often have to wait for Super Mario Kart and StarFox.

Anyways, you have created enough other threads where you complain about this. Probably best to leave this discussion for over in the 3DS VC sub forum. Talk about whether the 3DS should or shouldn't be able to handle emulating SNES games isn't really on-topic for the official Switch thread....

@GameOtaku
You clearly won't listen to somebody who actually has the system and actually emulates the games and is telling you point blank that 75% of the games cannot be emulated

You won't even do your due diligence and research to see for yourself.

You don't care about the truth, you just care about stubbornly proving that you're right, even though everyone in this entire forum knows emulation requires way more power... everyone except for you that is.

If you took five minutes and Google researched it, you would find out the truth of the matter. But you won't. But I'm sure you'll gladly spend 30 minutes on Google researching anything you can find to try to prove that you're right.

Seems like the latest system update has largely fixed the frame drops in Breath of the Wild, although the Korok Forest is still kind of framey. Everywhere else stays at a pretty steady framerate, though.

This is all you needed to say, and we'd have respected you. But you didn't, and now we're all rolling round on the floor in hysterics. Thanks for the lols.

I praying that virtual console does come to the switch and hopefully soon. There's so many games I really want to try. I still want to play Paper Mario and the Thousand Year Door, F-Zero GX, Super Mario Sunshine, the Metroid Prime games and ugh.. There's too many games! I grew up with the Wii and the DS so I missed out on a lot of classic titles.

@Eric258
I think what we're probably waiting on for the VC is for all the account stuff to be sorted out. As it stands there are some regions where you still can't link your eShop balance across Wii U/3DS and Switch. There aren't any My Nintendo Rewards up either. The eShop itself on the Switch is literally just a list of games with no categories or anything.

They're not going to roll out something like the VC, which will lean on all of that stuff, until they've got it sorted out. The Wii VC launched with the system, 3DS and Wii U were months after launch. So I don't think we'll be waiting too long for it.