If I were them, I probably would have given some details about what the service would provide or include before telling us how much it'd be. For their sake, I hope they impress us.
Indeed. You definitely catch more flys with honey than with vinegar.
Hopefully Nintendo will actually start talking about what will be available and what is planned before September's launch. They're not generally ones to talk about future plans, but they really ought to be.
ACA NeoGeo Samurai Shodown II – €6.99
AeternoBlade – €14.99
Frederic 2: Evil Strikes Back – €4.49 until February 15; regularly €4.99
Her Majesty’s Spiffing – €9.99
Mad Carnage – €4.99 (available February 2)
The Men of Yoshiwara: Kikuya – €19.99
Night in the Woods – €18.99
Shiftlings – Enhanced Edition – €9.36 until February 15; regularly €12.49
Sky Force Reloaded – €9.99
SteamWorld Dig – €9.99
Minecraft: Wii U Edition – Moana Character Pack – €2.99
Minecraft: Wii U Edition – Skin Pack 1 – €1.99
eShop Sales
Switch
Unbox: Newbie’s Adventure – €14.99 until February 8; regularly €29.99
Brawl – €7.99 until February 25; regularly €9.99
Brawlout – €14.99 until February 22; regularly €19.99
Frederic: Resurrection of Music – €4.01 until February 15; regularly €5.99
Grand Prix Rock ‘N Racing – €6.39 until February 19; regularly €7.99
Heroes of the Monkey Tavern – €6.99 until February 13; regularly €9.99
Sparkle 2 – €7.19 until February 7; regularly €7.99
The Count Lucanor – €7.49 until February 8; regularly €14.99
Woodle Tree – €4.49 until March 10; regularly €4.99
New 3DS
Ascent of Kings – €1.68 until February 8; regularly €2.25
3DS
Dan McFox: Head Hunter – €1.49 until February 15; regularly €2.49
Darts Up 3D – €0.98 until March 1; regularly €2.99
Epic Word Search Holiday Special – €4.79 until February 15; regularly €7.99
Epic Word Search Collection – €4.79 until February 15; regularly €7.99
Epic Word Search Collection 2 – €4.79 until February 15; regularly €7.99
Football Up 3D – €1.97 until March 1; regularly €2.99
Pic-a-Pix Color – €3.00 until February 15; regularly €5.00
Phil’s Epic Fill-a-Pix Adventure – €4.79 until February 15; regularly €7.99
Splat the Difference – €3.00 until February 15; regularly €5.00
Snow Moto Racing 3D – €5.99 until February 8; regularly €7.99
Sudoku Party – €3.00 until February 15; regularly €5.00
Word Logic by POWGI – €5.39 until February 15; regularly €8.99
Word Puzzles by POWGI – €5.39 until February 15; regularly €8.99
Word Search 10K – €4.79 until February 15; regularly €7.99
Word Puzzles by POWGI – €4.79 until February 15; regularly €7.99
Worcle Words – €5.39 until February 15; regularly €8.99
Wii U
Ascent of Kings – €1.49 until February 8; regularly €1.99
Pic-a-Pix Color – €3.00 until February 15; regularly €5.00
Sudoku Party – €3.00 until February 15; regularly €5.00
Word Logic by POWGI – €5.39 until February 15; regularly €8.99
Word Party – €9.59 until February 15; regularly €15.99
Word Puzzles by POWGI – €5.39 until February 15; regularly €8.99
Word Search by POWGI – €4.79 until February 15; regularly €7.99
Permanent Conditional Discount
Frederic 2: Evil Strikes Back – €2.49 for owners of Frederic: Resurrection of Music; regularly €4.99
Frederic 2: Evil Strikes Back – €3.34 for owners of Qbik or Sparkle 2 Evo or Violett; regularly €4.99
Patience, boys and girls. They'll give us details. I hate when people rush to conclusion like: "The Nintendo Switch Online is gonna suck so hard", and they don't know anything about it.
I'll wait for them to tell us more about their online services. Until then, for me, I'll reserve my judgement on it.
Making promise is easy. The hard part is keeping it.
Switch Friend Code: SW-3533-1743-6611 | My Nintendo: azooooz
@Shellcore It also somewhat fills in a Monster Hunter shaped hole.....
@Therad "Free" games....sometimes good, sometimes bad, and sometimes games you even care about and don't already own . I'd much rather they give you store credits rather than a "free" game that doesn't interest you (Sometimes you win big....MGSV was once a PS+ one....I missed it of course....Other times you get Knack and Rime...................) They also give members-only sales and additional discounts to members. Like this week on PSN is Dragon Age: Inquisition GOTY edtion 50% off for + members (plus tons of games I don't care about.) And last week's sale PSN members got another 10% off...not off the discounted price but added to the total percentage of discount....so there was some nice savings where, if participating, your savings were way more than the cost of membership.
But it's a ponzi scheme like Costco....the more you buy the more you save, and if you don't buy much, you're saving nothing and spending more. I'm enjoying the sales for now because I've never participated before, but I like the $20/year with no "free" games and "sales" better than $60 a year with them, honestly. It's an easier pill to swallow.
Sony also offers cloud saves (Nintendo probably will too which might be worth it as I have 2 switches and can't move my saves and digital games between them still....) but XBox offers cloud saves free even without membership.
@zitpig You're not paying for the online infrastructure unless there are dedicated servers. There's a rumor Splatoon will get dedicated servers. But XBL and PSN don't have dedicated, the other players are the server. All the platform provides is matchmaking servers.....yes, they cost money, but they've also been running them for over a decade for free and the games had the cost factored in....so it's still money on the top. Ongoing maintenance for major online games does cost though....another reason why GaaS stinks (and Miyamoto agrees...)
Free games...yeah...there are some winners....but looking at the history of BOTH PS+ and XBLG.......very very few of the freebies are terribly appealing and the appealing ones are games I likely already bought YEARS before they were free. And so many are games that are $5-10 otherwise by the time they're free (though, that's WITH subscription.....) Game Pass looks almost more appealing....$10 a month for an unlimited Blockbuster rental run....but most of the games in there are pretty old and meh as well. Make it a true Netflix/Spotify experience and I'll buy two XBoxen and a third for safety. Of course then it's $60/yr to play online and $10/mo to access the library....So $15/mo for unlimited rentals. Not a bad deal....if the catalog weren't old and anemic. I virtually lived at the rental store in the NES/SNES days so it's a return to form $3.50 for 3 days including the Friday night you pick it up.....fun times.
@zitpig "Powered by hundreds of thousands of servers, Xbox Live delivers maximum performance while reducing lag and cheating. Experience the most advanced multiplayer on a network built for speed and reliability."
Don't take the spin at face value. While it's "powered by hundreds of thousands of servers" you don't think they have global datacenters just running XBox matchmaking and Halo servers, do you? Those "hundreds of thousands of servers" are the Azure Cloud infrastructure. Also powering things like databases for Citicorp, SAP hosting for companies like Boeing, all Windows related services, Microsoft accounts, MSDN, all non-enterprise SQL Servers, etc. etc. XBox uses a small part of their existing server infrastructure. Just wait until they charge you monthly for Windows security patches to "pay for the infrastructure"
@Octane To play a little devils advocate, GameSpy used to be the standard matchmaking client on PC. They went bankrupt. "Free" may not be the best way to pay for even matchmaking servers. Steam does it now, but Steam's paying for it with proceeds from the store without R&D costs as a platform holder...or even developer anymore. Plus as a private company they don't have to show growth plans to shareholders. Probably the more important part.
@SLIGEACH_EIRE Technically there's more games I'd play online on Switch than on PS4. Splatoon, ARMS, Smash (lets just assume), Rocket League, Minecraft, DQ Builders 2, Rabbids, Titan Quest, maybe DBZ:X2, USF2, Doom, etc. Sure some of those are on PS4 too, but I'm more likely for a quick drop-in session to play on Switch than fire up the PS4 for a quick match of something. PS4, to me, is for long solo slogs, unless you're super into MMOs, Destiny, COD, etc. I'd be more likely to buy online continually for Switch than for PS4.
[Gah I just realized 2 more pages appeared and half the things I just wrote somebody else already said...oh well.]
@anti-matter you're not getting any freebies from Sony. You're paying for them. What do you think the $5 a month is for?
@Harmonie I don't really see Nintendo's network as notably worse than Sony's network. Versus Microsoft, sure, they built their platform on the online. But Sony seems to get it just as wrong and bare bones than Nintendo. At least on Switch we haven't had as many random outages as WiiU OR PS4....
@Octane For players? So the gameplay won't suck so hard. The P2P is a nightmare where some players have just-so-subtle lag advantages and teleport or jitter like crazy. Dedicated servers would mitigate that and the laggy players positioning would be known to the central server and that player would be the one hindered rather than giving them an advantage. For Nintendo? Promoting Splatoon and it's competitive environment as a high-end shooter. It's not impossible it will happen. Nintendo prides itself on polish as a differentiation and that could really steamline that game. It's not impossible, though I'm still not holding it likely.
@NEStalgia Dedicated servers won't mitigate that issue (though to be fair, it is very rare, I haven't encountered it myself yet). The bottleneck is going to be people's internet connection. If that sucks, no dedicated server can make the experience any better.
@DarthNocturnal Halo might. And obviously things like Sea of Thieves, persistent world games can't function without them. I don't think anyone would even mind payments to use "dedicated servers and persistent world online play" as it supplants MMOs to a degree. Even have XBLFree access P2P but step up to XBLG for access dedicated servers. That seems fair. Though some like Yorumi are always eager to point out that these same games on PC require no such payment..... which is a valid point. Why is EA, Ubisoft willing to provide servers for free for a platform on which they charge less while Sony and MS can't do it for a platform you bought from them? What's wrong with the pricing model?
Most games are just P2P though. I miss Quake in the 90's with tons of dedicated servers. Though most were really just stealing bandwidth from universities and such.
@YummyHappyPills I don't think I ever said they did? I did say in the comment before my last though that a website reported that it was delayed until Fall 2018 after spotting a change on Nintendo's Italian site.It was soon corrected and I think most just assumed it to be a simple typo as it was originally down for Fall 2017. Easy mistake to make for sure but now we know the real date, I think it's safe to say it was a slip rather than a typo.
As for the online date, it looks like that website that reported it was delayed until Autumn after spotting an update on the Nintendo Italia site was correct.
@OorWullie you did say "delayed to Fall", when in fact it wasn't. It was a slip up but it wasn't a delay from the prior info.
When that error was posted on Nintendo Italia, the previous confirmed window for launch was 2018. Just the year, not even a quarter, so I fail to see how narrowing it down within that window can be considered a delay, for both that Fall 2018 slip, and this new date?
Now Playing: Mario & Luigi Brothership, Sonic x Shadow Generations
Now Streaming: The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
@NEStalgia I don't think the 3rd parties have a choice. If they charge only on PC then there'd be outrage from the PC community but if they charge on all platforms there'd be outrage from the console community because you'd have to pay twice so they don't charge at all which ends up a compromise that people are fine with.
@Octane It definitely makes a difference. From observation I think I've worked out overall that the way Splatoon networking works is thus:
Players are paired in twos as synchronized clients. This is why most of the time when one player drops, two drop. Then there is 1 player designated as host to which all the others sync which also hosts the inkmap.
This has a myriad of effects.
1: Matchmaking is NOT based on player skill alone. It is also based on the networking requirements of the lobby. Meaning you may be more likely to get mismatched player skill because they suited the hosting needs and were available. It also delays matchmaking until suitable network/skill partners are located.
2: Assuming you're on perfect gigabit fiber with a 4ms ping to nearby servers, you are likely to be the server if enough players are near you. However if the other players are mostly not near you (think a twin league lobby with 6 Japanese players) the server will be one of those players, and your connection is now laggy.
3: Your upload to the server player is only as good as the synced client you're sharing your session with.
4: The host player ALWAYS has a significant advantage. Their actions are delayed to ALL other players, and other players actions are delayed to them. So they can react fastest. If you have "that one player" in your lobby that seems to just be faster than everyone else, odds are, they're the server.
5: Right now, victory favors the lagger. Splatoon appears to use a predictive AI based player movement system, much like a racer, to make gameplay appear always smooth and fluid. it GUESSES where players are when it doesn't know, which is why you see players doing weird things or teleporting (the infamous, they jumped off the ledge, then jumped off the ledge, then jumped off the ledge again, then killed you from above) When players are close to disconnecting it has them doing weird motions and gestures and patterns. To the host player, their actions will simply be delayed and sporadic. To other players who deal with latency from the lagger to the host and then whatever latency from the host to their player pair, you end up with quasi-invincible players who can suddenly accelerate faster than everyone else as the AI predicts their location for longer periods. Different players then have the potential to see DIFFERENT predictive results. And you can end up with situations where a player kills you AFTER you kill them. Because the different hosts had different results at different times. Minor jitter in Splatoon is extreme. At the S+ levels that matters substantially.
Dedicated servers GREATLY reduce those problems because there is one tier-2 hosted server tracking all 8 players independently, so the server knows who killed who first based on when it received the data without round robin guesswork. It still involves guessing the lagger, but the server knows who the lagger is rather than round robin guessing who the lagger MIGHT be. Thus the lagger will suffer for being laggy, instead of everyone else suffering for NOT being laggy and getting free movement. The server can update coordinates based on tracking the 8 players rather than the client determining coordinates based on likely outcomes of the last partial updates from the pool.
Part of that is splatoons clear re-use of MK netcode. Racer netcode does the AI based predictive stuff to keep it smooth. That works in racers because you're not actually racing other players, you're racing the clock. The other players don't actually matter much. That does not work for shooters because absolute positioning matters. Compare the "AI smoothed" netcode to Dissidia FF which is old school. Notice how choppy the framerate is? The game runs in stops and starts with frequent stalls. It's not smoothed out artificially like splatoon, you're seeing the ACTUAL lag as you wait for the players to update. And it reveals just how bad the internet is for PvP in general. BUT your positioning is always absolute. There are no phantoms and guesswork. But it's bad P2P play still. The game was designed around LAN play in an arcade....
IMHO, PvP should be confined to LAN and friends in general, while PvE works fine online.
There's the flip side: Gravity Rush 2, an offline game, had dedicated servers for odd content (some small bits of online only play.) They're shutting down the servers. Bye bye goes that content forever. And it's not even an old game. All for $60/yr.
@Grumblevolcano The issue is there's a few takeaways: 1) Online DOES cost money but due to politics of PC they can't charge, so console players are subsidizing leechy PC online play. 2) Online doesn't cost enough beyond margin to warrant paying for, so console players are being gouged. Either revenue for online is important and one group is paying for the other, or it's not important the group paying are being duped. Either way we have the platform that pays less for the game ALSO not paying for the online while the group paying more for the game also pays for online. Makes one wonder why they release on PC at all? I mean it can't be profitable, right?
@NEStalgia "1) Online DOES cost money but due to politics of PC they can't charge, so console players are subsidizing leechy PC online play."
Err, no? PC players are not leeching on anyone. You pay to MS or Sony. The costs of online are being payed by devs/publishers. The only leeching being done is by Sony and MS. Why should you need to pay to play for example battlefront 2? They haven't developed the game, the servers are maintained by EA. The only thing they do are the matchmaking and voice chat.
@YummyHappyPills You're correct in saying that it wasn't actually delayed again but I didn't put any thought into that part as it's irrelevant to the point I was making, which was it likely wasn't just a typo like many suspected after all. Their headline read "Paid Nintendo Switch Online Service Delayed To Fall 2018" so like I said, they reported it was delayed.
@Therad On the surface it's true. Below the surface it would take a lot of bribe money and some heavy drugging to convince me that the big publishers are not getting a cut of that subscription money and/or are not they key instigators behind it. Little ones like Psyonix? Not a dime. EA and Activision? You bet they get a cut. Whether it's a blanket tithe, or a per-user-per-session royalty or however they've arranged it, I'd be stunned if it were NOT happening. If I were to make a guess (complete speculation, not inspired by any known rumors I've heard of, just my own opinion), Microsoft started throwing money around to them with their XBLG requirement to lure publishers into supporting them as they established the XBox brand. And learning to enjoy the new royalties, the publishers began to pressure Sony and presumably Nintendo to provide the same. Once Sony began, it became "pay us or else you don't get our games" for Nintendo. So basically a protection racket run by the big publishers, though inspired by MS's generous bribe money last gen.
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