Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

@FragRed Indeed. When most of the western rules for businesses were designed it was designed for small scale businesses, mom & pop shops, maybe regional powerhouses at biggest. And a few with large reach but plenty of regional competition. Modern "business" however looks more like planetary feudal Houses, at best, with a reach beyond what most but the largest, most prominent governments had in the past. And more worryingly, cabals of said Houses really wield the control of those prominent governments completely, not far from the intrigue of old royal courts that were really controlled by a cabal of noble Houses.

Which, of course, when you go back and read a bit on the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, etc, is precisely what they were hoping to achieve.

@NEStalgia Just a couple of days ago Comcast and Fox (backed by Disney) went into a blind auction to buy out Sky Plc, a satellite and internet company here in the UK with roughly 23 million customers. Comcast won by bidding over £30 billion. It's scary just how much bigger that would make the company and how much power it gives them over what people watch, and I don't mean just normal programming but in particular news which can be manipulated to justify a particular political agenda.

I hope that Nintendo starts to look into doing some kind of deals themselves if it means keeping them in the game regarding third party support. Late games aren't good for the system in terms of sales, and aside from the odd exclusive such as Octopath Traveller (something tells me any sequel won't be exclusive), they need to do more.

@link3710 Paying for exclusivity is different from paying to keep it off one system though.

@FragRed Indeed. The consolidation of media on that scale of Disney and Comcast used to be illegal here in the States not so very long ago. Then they rolled back nearly all the media consolidation laws, turned a blind eye to the ones that were still illegal, and kept taking money from the companies. The beauty of the all powerful corporation. You don't need to worry about the laws. When you can afford to buy a politician, you're the one that writes the laws. That's what was the travesty about the "Net Neutrality" farce. That wasn't about neutrality. That was about content companies using government as a kudgel against telecom to do their bidding, while telecom previously used government as a kudgel against media. But the legislation itself was written, not by legislators, but like most modern legislation is written by corporate legal teams, and their "non-profit think tanks of industry affiliates" and submitted to their owned politician to submit as legislation. People act like it was government protecting the people from Comcast. No, it was the government carrying out Google/Facebook/Netflix/Apple's written policy to apply to a country for their own benefit. Now we see the other half of that with all media consolidating down to a few. The way of the modern world. Any function in society needs no more than a duopoly controlling it, and all excess human functionality can be cut from the equation to maximize efficiency.

Gorbechev rightly ascertained that the illusion of choice between two controlled options of the same organization is enough to placate the populations frustrations. Thus the CCCP would offer two candidates from the Communist party to vote between. People felt contented now that they had a choice of leaders, despite both being ranking officials of the same party as chosen by the current party leaders. It was "enough." that thinking is now applied to all things, from politics, to business. The illusion of choice between two options controlled by the same organization is enough to content the masses, indefinitely, in all things, apparently.

As for Nintendo, acquisitions cost a lot of debt. If you're making aquisitions but not controlling a market almost wholly these days, you're weakening rather than strengthening your sovereignty. For Nintendo, their mammoth cash reserve is the only thing keeping them from being bought out. They're a very expensive target where the cost to acquire is actually greater than the asset value, you're just buying cash in equal amounts. That creates an island for them that protects them. Nobody buys a currency reserve for cash value. Spending that money for acquisitions that don't form a pseudo monopoly would actually be worse for their long term survival and independence.

@Octane Certainly. The latter is cheaper than the former, and achieves the desired goal in more targeted fashion

@NEStalgia The problem Nintendo faces, is that as Sony and Microsoft buy into the exclusives market and the buying out of independent developers to bolster their own first party companies, this leaves Nintendo in a position where they are solely reliant on what little internal teams they have. They have already discovered how difficult and timely it is to develop HD games and they have not even reached current generation levels of hardware power as of yet.

As a company, Nintendo has for better or worse, relied on their own first party games to keep their systems selling. However, in the past prior to creating for HD, they were in a position to pump out games at a much greater level than they are now - hence one reason for merging all their teams. So if Nintendo is to survive, they really need to look at investing some of that huge pile of money sooner rather than later, especially as they can no longer guarantee each system release to be a big success as has been proven multiple times. And there are only so many failures you can take before you end up like Sega no matter how much of a Ducktales Money Pit you may have.

@subpopz Best avoid what is likely to come from

Those who preordered VC4 digitally will get it (or have got it) at midnight.

checks in on thread
...What did y’all do?? The number of words in these posts is too darn high.
Anyone heard word on when Grom Fandango is finally hitting?

@DarthNocturnal
They've got too much clout. They might make a one time exception, but that's all it will be is a one time exception. Unless enough developers band together and force the ultimatum en masse, they're not gonna back down. And that sucks because a lot of people do own PS4 and I want to play with them. They might even get another year sub from me if they allowed cross play. I've got a guy at work, huge Skyrim fan, that I would love to play with. But I'm not buying a second copy just to play with him.

But let's not put it all on Sony. Part of the reason they've been able to get away with it is because a lot of developers still aren't incorporating cross play when they should. If every single game had cross play between Switch and Xbox and PC, the pressure would be enormous. At the same time, if they played ball, more developers might be inclined to prioritize it. Cross play across all 3 consoles and PC needs to become a universal standard asap.

@DarthNocturnal
Forgot about it being F2P, but not sure if being F2P changes anything.

It's a game you're going to invest money in one way or the other. I'm not a person that's going to only play for free. Investing in two different copies just doesn't make sense.

How bout that DB Fighter Z though? How bout that Valkyria Chronicles 4 though? It's release week. Where's the excitement?!

Right now on the US EShop DBFighterZ is at #47 and VC Chronicles is at #79

@Mrtoad
It's disastrous, isn't it?

I don't really know what to make of it. DB Xenoverse 2 released and sold 500k copies, a lot of those sales from people specifically hoping for DB Fighter Z. Here it is, and it's confirmed to be a great game, full 1080p/60fps and 720p docked, but where's the fans?

Valkyria Chronicles 4 is just as surprising (and concerning). These are easily two of the best games that are going to release on the Nintendo Switch. When we look back at the full catalog of games released over the course of this generation and evaluate the top 50 lists and all that jazz, these two games will definitely be part of that discussion.

I don't really get it. The DB Xenoverse 2 forum was lively at the time of its release. This is a better game and much more highly demanded game and not a single person is in there talking about it.

But ya, we're kind of seeing this shift towards disinterest of high-quality games, whereas up to this point, even this summer, everything was exceeding expectations, even YS VIII. Both these games are just as good if not better, so it's really hard to grasp what's going on here.

But something is going on, even if I'm not sure what exactly it is yet.

Why people, just why?? The game comes out in a couple weeks, just wait!

@JaxonH DBFZ is doing fine. It was at #68 on Sunday, so it seems to have some traction. For comparison FIFA 19 releasing on the same day and is at #118 last time I checked.

@Mrtoad
Well, that's not exactly inspiring... for either game. Have to see how they perform after release but, last year NBA 2K18 was in the top 10 of the eShop. This year? Not even top 30. Last year, FIFA was top 10 of the eShop. This year? Seems it too will be nowhere to be seen (it might climb the ranks but, #118 this close to release isn't looking good). Last year DB Xenoverse was top 10 of eShop. Will the much more highly anticipated DB Fighter Z do the same?

If it was just one single game I would chalk it up to random chance, but it's like every single game now. Like a trend... a pattern shift. I guess for now all we can do is wait and see, and hope for the best.

DB FighterZ isn't even on the Europe eshops let alone preorders available despite the game coming out in a few days.

@ReaderRagfish What's sad is the cart is in poor condition and yet people don't seem to care.

Just watched the credits roll in Shining Resonance Refrain.

It's a solid, if not particularly remarkable, JRPG. The battle system is good but standard (it IS fun transforming into a dragon, but very OP), unlike some of the other big 3D RPGs on the system (notably XC2 & YS VIII) in runs native res at all times portable, though in terms of world design it's locations are the typical archtypes (grass area, forest, snowy mountain, etc.), and likely due to a smallish budget, there aren't many animated cutscenes, with the vast bulk of the story sections being told in a visual novel like presentation. It also has a few other oddities, like the fact that they seemingly forgot to add save points before a few bosses in the late game, and you can fast travel back to town, but not to any of the game's other regions (not even to the camps littered throughout the overworld).

Don't get me wrong, it was a fun enough time, but unless you're really into grabbing JRPGs, I'd say stick with the more popular choices like XC2, YS VIII, and Octopath (I assume, as I haven't yet played that last one).

Well personally, I'm waiting for VC1 before getting VC4. Besides which, with Prime preorder discounts not being a thing, why preorder games from Amazon anymore?