Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

I can't see many people buying a new console just to get the bonus items in a Freemium game like Fortnite. Maybe if they love the game and are buying a switch for the first time, but not just to get the bonus items. $300 is a bit much for a handful of in-game items.

And this is coming from someone who bought every single Collectors Edition release for City of Heroes/City of Villains just to get the cosmetic items.

People complaining about the Online Service is downright ridiculous. Nintendo is just starting on the paid service thing and people are already and childishly giving them the finger and making crud like they are evil, greedy and heartless. I am glad this Online Service is finally here in just a few hours, but people need to learn to accept things that they don't like instead of whining about it.

And I don't see what's wrong with ports of Wii U games for Switch. To me, the Switch is a much more powerful console than the Wii U. I have a lot of fun with my Switch and it is amazing. In my honest opinion, the Switch succeeded what the Wii U failed to do and is much better than the Wii U. I am looking forward to what Wii U game they will port to the Switch.

@Ralizah @JaxonH I think the port thing.....Nintendo is the master of poor timing. I mean they always have been. Their ideal roadmap looks like rush hour in L.A. followed by Route 66 (and not the FFXV version.) It hurts the optics of their offerings time and time again, which is why everything they do always looks amazing in hindsight and bad at the time. Last year at launch they frontloaded the entire schedule with online focused games, one after the next, after the next. It was online overload, probably to tie into the online services original date. But it made the frontend imbalanced. Little single player games for the type of gamer who jumped in for Zelda type experiences. Then after Splatoon came out they changed courses and went into RPG overdrive. XC2, Skyrim, Sushi Striker, Ys, Shining, Octo with nothing to please the people that jumped in for games like MK8 and ARMS. They are very poor at balancing their rollout, often bundling all of one extreme or all of other extremes. So for much of 2018 the story was almost no new experiences at all, and almost entirely WiiU experiences back to back to back. Feast or famine always. If you look at the 2 year arc you see all the amazing games. But when you take any 6-8 month snapshot you see a desert an an oasis. Anyone in the desert will be unhappy even if they're getting close to their oasis.

Yeah the wining gets old when you look big picture, but it's also someone Nintendo's own creation with their often nonsensical planning or lack thereof. Many of their wounds are self inflicted. We just get the fallout from it.

@JaxonH It's funny I was talking in another thread, and one of Sony's greatest strengths has been that FF collection. It's been identified as part of Playstations brand identity since the PSX. Losing that suddenly, all at once, to both Nintendo and XBox..... that has to have a pretty devastating effect long term on Sony. A list of timeless must have exclusives for them just got cut 30% in a single blow. And the "Square identity" of PS was just removed. The relationship between Square and Sony has been inexplicably tight, to the point that there was clearly some kind of collusion, or contract, or back rubbing (or blackmail) of some sort going on. Square suddenly throwing all engines in full reverse, darn the torpedoes, full speed!, strikes me as a serious change in direction and I'm curious if it signifies a breakdown of said historical relationship. Hey they just gave them Last Remnant, they still have Dissidia NT (which Sony part paid for), and for now KH1&2....but the "Square = Sony" umbrella just popped in one giant explosion. I'm curious (and a little frightened) what that means for Sony going forward.

Also, back on the prior topic, another thread we had a discussion, Switch is actually the only platform that could actually do the good parts of the original XBox One DRM scheme without the bad. The good part was you could make your physical copy digital and get the convenience. The bad was once you did the disc was useless. WIth Switch, we know each cart has a serial they can read and lock out online. They actually could transfer physical to digital and back again without the controversy XBox endured, and offer a form of value. For now, unless at Midnight I find out my digital games are magically playable on my other system, digital remains a no-go outside a handful of titles on Switch as physical still has tons more value particularly in conjunction with cloud saves. WIth digital you can't really use your cloud saves for more than backup.

@Alantor28 I agree the online whining is overblown, but "just starting out" isn't an excuse for getting it wrong on a paid service. It's a commercial product. You either sell what people want to buy, or you don't, and locking a feature they already had behind a pay wall to compel purchase of an otherwise undesired service may net sales but it also garners bad faith which usually comes back to bite at a later date, not immediately.

"people need to learn to accept things that they don't like instead of whining about it."

Not when it comes to commercial products from for-profit companies. You're not here to adapt to their needs. They're there to adapt to consumer will. They will float test balloons to see how much they can get away with. If consumer attitude is to simply accept whatever the test balloon offers, they will never aim to provide value of any sort. This is business, not Pollyanna. It's not a one way street, we're the other half of the contract. Pushing back against a poor offering, particularly when people feel they're being compelled to pay for something they don't desire simply because key service will be withheld if they dn't doesn't make it a good offering, it makes it something people are compelled to pay. To see how well that works long term for image, take a look at cable companies. They're making money, but public favor is clearly against them overwhelmingly, and competitors are instantly explored.

Hmm. Well u do have some points about it and thank you for agreeing with me about whiners on the Online Service being overblown about this. But who knows? Maybe the Online Service will get better in the near future? We'll just have to wait and see about this.

Thank you for pointing out the obvious. And I mean, I'd like to point out that many of the "indie" titles we're getting these days that don't count in these discussions would have been equivalent to major releases back in the NES/SNES/64 era since they are y'know... made with smaller teams on a more reasonable budget like games used to be. Stuff like the Steamworld series, Hollow Knight, Stardew Valley etc are larger in scope than many classics.

Yeah, the indie game scene might create a lot of shovelware, but it's also the source of some truly amazing games that triple A developers would have never considered. Sim City was originally made by just two people. As was Sim City 2000.

By today's major developer standards a game like Bionic Commando (original game) would be something to throw in the trash bin without reading the idea submission. But back when the game first came out, it was ground breaking and a major release. Thus it falls to indie developers to make games like that.

The Game Dev Tycoon type games illustrate the issue quite well. Early on you can make a quality game (ha, unlikely) with just the one starting employee. But the better the games get, the more graphics and other elements are included, the more expensive they become to make. And the more employees they take to make within a reasonable time frame (1 or 2 years eventually). Especially if you're doing quality assurance and bug fixes before releasing the game into the wild. Plus paying for advertising campaigns...

It's massively simplified, but still a bit of an eye opener.

Nintendo Switch Online at the moment is the service equivalent of Animal Crossing Amiibo Festival

are they replacing the A button with amiibo taps?

@Alantor28

“, but people need to learn to accept things that they don't like instead of whining about it.”

No. They really really don’t. Not in Video Games, not in any other aspect of Consumer life, not in anything.

@FaeKnight

But that’s essentially asking people to pay for years of bad decisions that, if they’d decided in sufficient time (near the start of the systems development probably) that they wanted to improve their online offering, they could have fixed with some funding and outsourcing. I’ve been in IT and seen whole websites and TV Channels set up entirely by outsourcing, despite having to connect to a 1950s Mainframe for Customer Data. Instead I genuinely think they’ve decided to test how little they have to give away in return for cash.

That history also makes it hard to believe this extra revenue will be spent on improving heir service. I hope I’m wrong, but I remain sceptical.

The poster the other day who referred to it as the ‘Nintendo tip jar’ has it spot on IMHO.

On a different tack, you’re right about the difference between games development in the past compared to now. It seems really obvious. But it seems to need to be repeated a lot!

I wonder if Nintendo would ever use the money they get from subscriptions to be able to continue to provide free DLC in multiplayer games like Mario Tennis and Splatoon or even widen the scope of free DLC. Time will tell when Smash Ultimate releases since new fighters are not cheap to make, but I wonder still.

@NEStalgia When it comes to online services and the communications space, Nintendo is practically an indie compared to Sony and Microsoft lol.

My biggest problem is that they delayed the online for a year... and only had cloud saves to show for it.

It's not the end of the world (unlike what people may try to tell you), but it's still underwhelming, you know? The "giving them more time" thing already passed them. They've had plenty of time to rethink their online imo.

Well I mean its not as if the extra features are required for an online service to go paid sub. They are just trying to mitigate server costs. Anything else is gravy for the customer.

@EvilLucario Well, not that I think it's worthwhile, but from what we can gather, the original plan didn't have online features in the NES titles, so that is something else that was done during the delay.

@GrailUK Vs Microsoft the makers of Windows, the "cloud first company" sure. Compared to Sony the makers of more disastrous DRM rollouts for music, video, books, and the yo-yo PSN store, Nintendo's probably par.

@EvilLucario Yeah, I think "we need another year and a half....to give you exactly what we already said we'd give you...which isn't all that much....and really couldn't have needed a year and a half of saying "we'll tell you about it later" to come up with only what they told us on day 1. (And still not actually enhancing any limited features like handling of digital purchases.) I still think the delays were largely about it being DeNA/outsourced with the app and such and it was never working right. "We'll tell you more later" implies there's something desirable they're waiting to tell you about.

@Ryu_Niiyama I feel like Jeckyl and Hyde, as in one thread I defend it and in the next bash it, but "just mitigating costs" my rear. Microsoft started it but hosts dedicated servers for most 1st party games. Sony just copied it as a revenue stream without the actual servers (and raised prices to cover the game giveaways and sales) and has mostly admitted how profitable it is. Matchmaking servers could run on 486's and are more than covered in the cost of a $60 game, while games like Diablo3 are running on dedicated servers, with dedicated server-side profiles (cloud saves!) that don't get a dime of the subscription money (unless Activision required it), while Steam charges less for games, runs matchmaking, charges no sub, and still is very profitable. Microsoft gets to use that reasoning because it's actually true for them (though they don't charge on Windows for the very same dedicated server access.) Sony and Nintendo don't get that excuse. You already paid for it as part of the total cost of the game. "Maximizing profits" isn't the same as cost mitigation.

Cloud saves is costing them more than the matchmaking servers, so I can accept charging for that, that's fair, but then it's not an "extra feature" that's the core value. The cloud storage is a legit space rental and they can legit charge for that outside the costs of the games. Same with the VC library. That's fair. Even if online weren't gated I'd buy for that. But then the "extra features" are the only important aspects.

@Grumblevolcano "Nintendo Switch Online at the moment is the service equivalent of Animal Crossing Amiibo Festival "

ROFL, I was seriously tempted to make this my sig.... You won the internet.

@subpopz Yeah, I definitely believe it's an intro price (the renew page talks about "at the current price", so yeah, the price will go up, the games will increase.) But Switch is 1.5 years old. Console cycles are 6 years at the outside, and mobile tech ages fast. Most of Switch's life cycle has NSO painted as a test.

I suspect a decent portion of the funds will be going towards improving the NSO service over time and securing the rights needed to release more 3rd party NES and SNES games for the NES service. Not all of it, obviously. But a decent portion of it.

Firmware 6.0.0 is out right now.