Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

with rumors about the NX using cartridges i am very sure it will be a fusion between a console and a handheld. nintendo had been talking about a fuison before they used the term NX.
the controller will probably be the handheld. when you get home you take the cartridge out of the handheld and put it in the console so the extra horsepower can be used for loading better textures and better effects etc. therefore however the console will not surpass the horsepower of current gen consoles like ps4 and XONE. at least not by much. thats how nintendo can sell a console and a handheld for a good price.
any game for NX will be playable on both the console and handheld of course.
i think the handheld will be very similair to the 3DS in terms of design and button layout. 3D feature could be dismissed. sadly

@Octane plus I think investors and shareholders aren't gonna be happy with more vague nonanswers.

@6ch6ris6 The problem with that idea is that's it a very expensive product when you could sell the systems separately for a lot less; lower price = bigger market. That also means you're not limiting yourself to one product. The advantage of selling two systems is that you always have something to fall back on when one doesn't become a commercial success (e.g. Wii U). The ''fusion'' concept is an idea that appeals to Nintendo fans, and we already have a console like that, it's called the Wii U.

Also, I'm still not buying the cartridge idea; it's too expensive.

I hope the NX is "underpowered" and sells gangbusters just to stick it to the console war mongers.

Well if you assume everything is going to be the same as the Wii U again then sure. It just means the New Zelda is going to have longer draw distances and less rough edges. Which is nice but not game changing. But what would change things is the way that something closer to the XBOne would be easier for third parties to develop for. Which is what improving the spec and changing the architecture would bring.

I think people seem to get it in their heads that Sony and Microsoft are doing something insane with their hardware. Something that Nintendo could never replicate. But the truth is that they aren't. The reality is that there's no reason why Nintendo couldn't release a console that caters to all markets. If they wanted.

@skywake Given there was large first party game droughts on Wii U as a result of Nintendo getting used to HD development don't you think there would be large first party game droughts on NX if NX wasn't a Power PC based system?

@skywake I agree, but I still think that would be a half-assed attempt. I don't think the "casual" Wii crowd is coming back, so I don't see the necessity to release a (pretty) low-end console for that market. That's a huge gamble. If they don't buy the NX en masse, you're stuck with the same issues the Wii U has, an underpower console with low sales. The architecture would be the only improvement. However, as you said yourself, the PS4 and XOne aren't magical powerhouses, I don't see why aiming for more than the PS4 is such a weird proposal. Especially in 2017. That ensures not just third party games, but also the fact that they will be running better than the XOne and PS4 versions. With plenty of games running in 720p or 900p at 30fps, you really don't want to aim for anything less than the XOne.

Nintendo have more dev studios now, and we haven't seen that much new content for both their consoles. We can safely assume they are working hard to have a good launch lineup.

Also, going from PowerPC to arm or x86 isn't hard as long as you have a good toolset. No company is stupid enough to write games in assembler.

Nintendo sells systems.

You may be onto something here. They may not have wanted this before. If they believe the market has limited growth opportunities the next decade, they could easily eat somebody else's market instead.

But they have to be pessimistic about said potential.

@Octane It's a weird proposal because we're talking about Nintendo here. The company that always does awkward things for better or for worse.

@Therad So the jumpgap between standard definition and HD is larger regarding the programming aspect than PowerPC to ARM/x86 then?

Yes. It doesn't require any more programming time. If anything, more processing power can decrease dev time, since you might not need to optimize as much.
But doing high res assets can be very time consuming, and Nintendo didn't account for that properly.

While this paragraph is completely true, it is also true that it doesn't mean that such a console from Nintendo would succeed. In fact, there's a good chance that it would fail. This means that the reality could be one that none of us want to admit: the market just doesn't want a Nintendo console anymore, and therefore one won't sell to anyone outside of the dwindling fraction of the Nintendo fanbase that continues to buy their consoles, regardless of what Nintendo does.

I agree with you’re reasoning. My best guess at this time is their next home console will ship with a controller that has no screen. However, I think it’s not quite right to call the Wii U a fusion device at the capacity people mean with the NX. The Wii U was strictly a home console with a limited ability to “detach” from the television. That does not make it a mobile system in the two most meaningful distinctions of the term here—1) that it can go anywhere like a portable device, and 2) that it can play Nintendo’s portable (3DS) library of games.

I do think there is good reason to believe Nintendo’s next mobile and home platforms will be more connected than ever. There is Iwata’s comment of making their platforms one connected “family” of platforms, specifically like the iPhone is to the iPad. It’s totally in Nintendo’s interest to bridge their home and mobile libraries wherever it makes sense. This would increase their market appeal, boost the image of their platform by consolidating their user-bases, consolidate resources in terms of production, and expand the library of games they can sell to users who only own one of Nintendo’s two platforms. If their next platforms share a similar architecture and OS/API, they would make this very easy to accomplish.

I don’t think there’s even a question that Nintendo will move in this direction, but only a question of to what degree.

I could see this going either way. It largely depends on what exactly the NX is and what it would need to get out of it’s physical media.

It’s not necessarily as expensive as some think. It would not have to cost Nintendo $25 (USD) or even $10 a cart. For example, some manufacturers offer class 10 SD cards of 64GB capacity for about $1 a piece if you buy in bulk, and those are rewritable. It’s important to remember that the Blu-Ray discs used for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One games are not rewritable. 50GB rewritable discs are about as expensive as 64GB rewritable flash memory. Console physical media only needs to be readable. It’s not like Nintendo has to go with premium rewritable SDXC-like technology.

Any large capacity flash storage will exceed discs and offer portability. And if Nintendo is investing a whole platform on the tech and they can guarantee the manufacturer a sufficient sales threshold, the price for an individual unit will go down a lot. Low capacity carts are not as expensive as well, so many games would not cost much if any more than 3DS cartridges currently do. Not every game needs a 64 GB cartridge. They would also save some money in both system production and repairs not using disc drives.

However, with that said, I don’t think it’s so much that cartridges are expensive as it is that discs are so damn cheap. Even at a dollar, discs are significantly cheaper. However, if being compatible with both a home and mobile unit is an important feature for the NX, Nintendo might deicide this is simply the cost of doing business in this case, and aim for high sales output.

Another big problem though is the prep-time cartridges need in manufacturing. Discs can be printed pretty quickly, but cartridges need around two weeks to be written and packaged, so developers have to submit their gold version at least two weeks prior to release. That’s okay for a platform like 3DS where all the games are exclusive versions of third-party games, or produced by Nintendo. But for some developers releasing their game on other platforms, this could be a real problem and annoyance if that last bit of development time is important to them.

I understand you’re just exploring possibilities, but that’s a reductive argument of false permanence. It doesn’t really explain why many people chose not to buy the Wii U (and 3DS). Yes, the last generation has seen a decline in sales for Nintendo. But to say therefore this decline is simply indefinite isn’t necessarily true. I think Nintendo’s fate is still very much up to Nintendo. It’s easy to forget that both the Wii U and 3DS are continuations of what are now more than 10-year-old brands. In that time a lot of new stuff has happened that captured many people’s interest.

I think a few things are pretty clear about what Nintendo is going to do. They see that the Wii and DS name just won’t interest people the way they once did. The novelty just isn’t there anymore, but Nintendo still has brand power. I don’t think they have to have lost the “casual” market forever. While many have moved to smartphones for gaming, I think we’re at a point that smartphones are essentially locked into their current form-factor and market appeal, and are not novel in themselves as they once were. Here Nintendo might actually have an advantage again if they find a way to build a novel form-factor that is exciting to everyday people in a way that smartphones cannot be. People tend to like new things.

There is also the fact that many young Wii gamers are just now entering age of purchasing power. If Nintendo shifts it’s marketing effort to an older demographic (similar to Wii)—something they should do in any case as far as the west is concerned— they could probably catch many of those people again.

I think gamers (and people in general I guess) tend to look at things in a limited prism where only the recent past determines the future, when in truth there is both a greater history and a less determined future. The tech media deserves a lot of blame here though. They love drama and tend lack the insight to predict anything that isn’t specifically about the tech itself.

Don’t get me wrong, Nintendo could still fail though. I suppose my main point is that perceptions are not good predictive indicators because they can change.

@DylanMcGrann What I meant was that the Wii U already is a console that appeals strictly to Nintendo fans (i.e. not a commercial success), not that the Wii U is a "hybrid" system.

@Octane Fair enough. I thought maybe that's what you meant, but went with the assumption you were referencing the argument some use that because the Wii U has two screens like a DS and is a "tablet" of sorts, the console is a failed home/portable "fusion" console. I see now that isn't what you meant to say.

@Octane Most of Nintendo's consoles have been like that though. Before the DS/Wii era, the last era that wasn't of the strictly appeal to Nintendo fans type was the SNES/GB era in the 90s.

@Grumblevolcano I know, but those were different times. It kinda worked for the N64 in the 90s, but today? That fanbase is way too small for Nintendo to solely rely on. When there's good competition and you're not doing your best to compete, people will move over to different things.

@Octane Like I said earlier, Nintendo doesn't make sense especially in recent times when they thought they could get way with releasing 2 consecutive consoles (3DS, Wii U) with few games coming in the first year of its lifespan. So I stand by my prediction that they're trying to get the Wii/DS audience back with a weak console that includes a gimmick meanwhile thinking that some Wii U ports (including Breath of the Wild) will be enough to satisfy their core fanbase because "they will buy anything".

@Grumblevolcano yeah I have a feeling we will see some Wii u ports to fill the summer for nx.