Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

@Knuckles-Fajita Ok i read doomsday and for a second i thought we were talking about The Death of Superman lol

Ok I’m sold on The Touryst

@Knuckles-Fajita I just checked and Hidden Palace's music is the same as Lava Reef Act 2 which is in Mania. So yeah, it's just the 3 you mentioned.

@DarthNocturnal Yeah, when a listing goes up usually everything involved is either licensed indefinitely, or a fixed period of time. Most games are the former, and the latter is like how Bayonetta 1+2 were taken off the Wii U eShop after 5 years since the music rights had likely expired and there was no way it would have been worth it to renegotiate.

@Cotillion I mean, it's all theory since we can't see the contracts, but I'm assuming the original contract specified 5 years on the Wii U one, and it wasn't worth having the legal team draft up another contract to extend it because no one was buying it anymore. The Switch release presumably would have required a new contract.

Edit: to clarify, they only are presumably leasing the rights on a specific use case basis, not for anything they want.

I never really understood this argument. I can't actually think of an example in real life where it works like this. If I buy a sixpack of beers in the supermarket, I can't drink these in a bar. If I watch a movie in the cinema, I can't rewatch it automatically at home. If I buy my music on an LP, I can't listen to it on a CD... Of course they could make it possible with digital media, but I can't really see any worthwhile incentive for a company like Nintendo to do so.

Saying this, it would make sense to stick with a subscription service for their classic content which covers multiple Nintendo platforms from now on; meaning that you only need one NSO for both your Switch 1 and future Switch 2 (or pro, or whatever...).

This looks cool! I'll probably pick it up when I have some more free time on my hands. I just bought a new house and it's insanely busy at work right now, so there's not a lot of gaming going on right now. Thanks!

@toiletduck There is 1 example and that is the Xbox situation. Games you own on OG Xbox and 360 are playable on XB1 when it's added to backwards compatibility. Games stopped being added in June 2019 because the focus is on getting everything you own on XB1 (XB1 games and backwards compatible games) working on Scarlett but the current list is pretty impressive.

@toiletduck
Agreed. I HATE when people are like, "I bought it once on the Wii VC, I should own it FOREVER AND ALWAYS ON EVERY SYSTEM I EVER OWN."

Like...seriously? Is that how all of your media works? Nope. You buy a movie, a song, a book, you're pretty much locked into whatever service you bought it through (with a few exceptions, I'm sure). If you're wicked old school, you're also locked into the form factor you bought it (yes, I still buy actual paper books lol).

@Grumblevolcano
And then you have this. I'm gonna say something on this: I LOVE Microsoft. Some people are Apple people, I'm a Microsoft person. I have surface everything, I've owned ever Xbox, etc. I totally support them, and I think they always add a necessary element of innovation and competition to whatever field they enter.

That being said, I think they're heading down the wrong path. I don't know how to explain it, but I don't know how they're going to keep making enough money to stay in the gaming arena. They're almost at the point with this Game Pass stuff where I feel like they're BEGGING me to try it, almost like they're PAY ME to do it for 3 months lol (I think it's literally a DOLLAR right now to try it out for 3 months). With all this backwards compat stuff... I don't know. I think MS is gonna turn around in a year or two and wonder where all their gaming revenue is going. They're already dead last in terms of worthwhile exclusives, and people keep proving that exclusives sell systems.

I usually hate voxel style games, but The Touryst is weirdly gorgeous. Footage of it reminds me of the Link's Awakening remake.

Books and DVDs are pretty much 1-time purchases. I have some DVD boxsets that I've had since the early 2000s that I must have played on about 10 different devices. Oh and I still have a first edition version of The Hobbit book, from like 1940 or whenever it came out.

It's ultimately up to the publisher really. I can definitely see some logic to the idea of Nintendo just having an all-time license for some classic games. They could sell it at a higher price of course.

Yeah, I think it's actually pretty normal to expect at least some purchases to carry over to new consoles. Would certainly be a nice way of convincing me to buy more digital, at least. Otherwise I just wait till the console is outdated by its successor to soft mod it.

@Cotillion I’ve bought movies and music on services, to later have the content removed from the service with no recoupment to me. So there’s that to consider, as well.

@Dezzy really? I have you been able to play your DVDs in BluRay quality on your BluRay player? Cuz that's the comparison were making here - either 3DS to Switch (res and TV) or Wii U to Switch (portability).

@Cotillion why should the VC version be available to you on a totally different system? I still haven't seen a valid argument for this.

@Cotillion
Good points, but a couple things:

-The Steam argument is a false analogy, because PC games have always been that way. I still have the game disc for Fire and Ice from the 90s, and I could go back and get that to work on my rig right now if I wanted to put a few minutes into figuring it out. That's just been the nature of PC hardware since...forever. Not comparable.

-In general, you're comparing apples to oranges, because you and I and everyone else here knows full well that game consoles are in no way similar to other media devices like Smart TVs, Smart Phones, even BluRay players and tablets. When a console generation passes, the old console generally "dies" - the company ceases supporting it with security fixes, updates, etc. Those other devices mentioned (phones, tablets, etc.) tend to hang around for quite some time. I have a BluRay player from like 2010 that still receives online updates. My point being, you can't expect software to be universally accessible RIGHT NOW in the console environment if console makers routinely abandon the older devices when the newer ones come out.

@Dezzy
Same thing. It's great on paper to be like, "I bought Lord of the Rings YEARS ago on my Google account and I can still play it on my various phones/tablets today! Voila!" but you're dealing with devices that continue to be supported by the companies that make them, so you're not doing a fair comparison.

I do think things will come around, though. Microsoft is obviously going in a streaming, pseudo-hardware direction.

Because if it's an identical version of the game, and the different platforms offer nothing particularly new in how it can be played, it's reasonable to claim that it's the same item. In some cases it probably is literally the same code just copied over.

Once hardware advances to the point where they stop having to rebuild the VC for each new console, I could agree. But as of right now, they're putting a significant amount of work to bring things over and thus should be paid. The difference with Steam from Consoles is that as of now Steam is not doing any work to update the games to be compatible with newer hardware, that work is put off on the user. Consoles on the other hand have the software creators doing the work.

@Dezzy @Cotillion in my view, with VC you don't buy a game but you buy the possibility to play a game on the VCs device. But ok, let's agree to disagree. Btw; I would definitely applaud and appreciate it if Nintendo would chose the direction your suggesting.

@toiletduck Likewise, in my view, when I buy a Switch cartridge, I'm not buying the game but the possibility to play it on this one device.

At the same time....when I buy that...I know that I am not guaranteed the ability to play it on a subsequent device.

To the general topic as a whole, sure, you could argue VC purchases should come with you, and largely on Wii to Wii U they did, with a large discount.

What people fail to realise, is how different Switch is from Wii U and Wii. ARM vs PPC.

An emulator works by taking code, from say an SNES, and effectively using system resources, translates it to whatever the actual system understands.

So if they wanted Wii U VC on Switch as it was....well they cant. The emulator for SNES there, would be built to translate SNES Code, into PowerPC code.

On Switch, they'd need a new emulator, which they pulled from the SNES Classic it turns out, that turns SNES code into ARM code.