Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

@NEStalgia
Oh I’m sure it’ll be worthwhile, if you do play all of them. I just don’t think it’s necessary when the story summary literally walks you through the same exact plot points chapter by chapter. But if you want to, definitely go for it.

I myself considered playing the previous games but after I read the story recap I decided it wasn’t really necessary. If the games were on Switch I probably would. But I don’t really have the desire to play two full games I already know the story on if I can’t play it with hybrid freedom.

I’m also playing Persona 4 Golden on Steam, btw. And I haven’t gotten back to it much because... again, stuck on TV. I DO have the Win2, but it’s just not the same as Switch where it’s super rugged, durable and comfy and longer battery life. It’s my favorite Persona, which is a whole other discussion. But ya. It’s kind of case in point for why I really only invest in games if they’re on Switch nowadays.

@JaxonH If it comes to Switch, it would likely be announced far enough away from Catherine's release that it doesn't affect Catherine sales. I think Nintendo learned the trick too given the Direct Mini came after Animal Crossing back in March and no new games have been announced while Paper Mario is still an upcoming release.

@JaxonH p4g is the only justification Vita ever had....

But yeah, that's kind of why i don't want to start with 3. I'm afraid it runs the joy of 1 and 2 later.

But i might cave...

@Grumblevolcano
Catherine. I’m gonna give that game an honest go again. First time I played it I was bewildered by the type of game it was. I didn’t know it was a puzzle game going in. Except it’s not really just a puzzle game. It has puzzle gameplay, kind of like Pushmo, actually (Pushmo fans, here ya go!), but it’s very story driven like Persona, with character designs similar to Persona. Heck, it’s made by the same team. I liked what I played, but the gameplay was tough- for some reason I was struggling. Idk if I wasn’t in the right mindset, because I LOVE Pushmo, but I was constantly screwing up. I see now there are numerous difficulty settings and an undo function. So I’m feeling more confident it’ll click for me this time.

@Grumblevolcano
Is that really fair? The genre of Catherine and Persona are completely different (puzzle and rpg). I’ll never understand the logic behind “if A sells well enough we will bring product B” especially if they’re so different.

@JaxonH @Grumblevolcano @GameOtaku

Yeah, I'm going to vote with my wallet for Catherine's Switch release. I've never played Catherine before, but I want to show Sega / Atlus that Switch owners want more of their games on this platform. As the saying goes, "money talks".

Que the AC/DC song.

@Magician
True money talks but if the product they want to succeed before bringing something else is uninteresting to consumers what’s the point? You wouldn’t judge if an rpg would sell based solely on whether a racing game did well would you? If it were if P4G sells well on switch then we will bring P5R then that would be justified.

@GameOtaku It's more about spacing releases enough that they have a chance of success. I'm pretty sure that Splatoon wouldn't be the massive franchise it is currently if it wasn't for the large game drought in summer 2015 (nothing between Splatoon in late May and Mario Maker in mid-September for NA, only Yoshi in between for Japan and Europe).

New IPs and smaller IPs thrive off game droughts provided there's already reasons to buy the console in the first place.

@Grumblevolcano
I can understand why they wouldn’t want their own products competing with themselves. My issue is the whole vote with your wallet and if this sells well we may or may not bring the product you have been saying you WILL buy. Catherine looks like a fantastic game but it’s a puzzle game not an rpg. I’m going to buy Catherine anyway but some will not buy it because the genre isn’t for them. So with that in mind I don’t think it’s a fair metric to gauge demand for one game by sale figures of a different genre game. Ex if you were EA would you base a port of CoD simply on the sales of Burnout? How does that make sense? The better comparison would’ve been Wolfenstein and Doom from their rival companies.

@GameOtaku I agree. I'm not buying some other game I'm not interested in to 'show support' so some company will bring a different game in a different genre. Apply this to other developers and it looks even more ridiculous. Like Nintendo saying "ohh, you want BotW2? ok, well, if Splatoon 2 sells well enough we'll consider it, maybe". Granted, Nintendo is in a position to do whatever they want and both of those would sell well regardless of anything, but it's the just notion that's bothersome.
The other side is no one needs to prove to developers that Switch is a viable platform. It clearly is and there's plenty of other developers who know that. I'd rather support the ones who are releasing on Switch without the need for begging and/or buying their other unrelated games to get a release.

I mean, I plan on buying Catherine but only because I was going to buy it anyways, I just hadn't been able to decide between the PC and PS4 version. Now that Switch is an option, it'll be my choice.

I got Catherine on all platforms, Yes I’m going to get it on the switch but not on day one.
I got 5 other games this month, we are also rebuilding our house and yust bought a new car, can’t have everything 😂

DOOM Eternal Switch release date "coming pretty soon"

https://nintendoeverything.com/doom-eternal-switch-release-da...

I don’t think anybody has advocated buying a game you have no interest in to “show support”. It’s a ridiculous argument people always put forth every time this topic comes up.

No. It’s not what people are saying. At ALL.

What people are saying is the game interests them already, because the game looks fun on its own merits. But they will prioritize buying it to show support. If choosing between it and another game, their desire to show support will be the tiebreaker. For people who already played it and like it, they will buy it because they played it and liked it, but they also want to show support. It’s not mutually exclusive guys. Show support and actually be interested in the game at the same time. But even if somebody did want to buy it without having interest, that’s their right to do so. It’s their dollars and their vote, and if the potential payoff is worth it to them then I say good for them. And they might end up enjoying it, too. If someone decides, eh, I wasn’t gonna grab it but, I value potential support enough that I’m willing to take a chance on this game... more power to them. We are in no position to get on a high horse and judge others for what they value and standing behind their beliefs. Nobody’s telling you to do the same.

But genres have nothing to do with anything (short of a game being in a genre that is well known to consistently underperform in relative comparison, which is not the case here). What matters is how it performs compared to how it performed on other systems. That’s what matters. It has absolutely nothing to do with comparing it to any other game. Has to do with the fact that if this game can reach 80% of the sales of platform A, then perhaps other games can also reach 80% of the sales of platform A. Because generally speaking, larger overall trends like that exist, within a certain margin of error. But if anything the performance of this game wouldn’t be as well as Persona anyways. If this game can do 65% maybe Persona does 85%. It is from the same team and they will take cues from their own games’ performance to shape their beliefs about how other games of theirs would potentially perform... Right or wrong, I guarantee you if this game bombs they’ll think twice about putting other games of theirs on the system. If the game wildly succeeds, they’ll reconsider putting other games of theirs on the system. That’s just how it works guys. It’s how every company out there gauges demand for their other titles.

Catherine always interested me until i saw what the gameplay was..... It's like an indie puzzle game with a VN bolted on.

In other news I repaired my 4 drifting left joycon. Took about an hour to 1.5. not too bad at all, though they're a few really annoying tiny parts at odd angles.... And you're doing it all with tweezers. The battery plug and the trigger flex ribbon were the only ones that had be cursing under my breath a bit. At about $6 bucks a stick plus tools, i can live with that. Cheaper than a new $90 set of joycon even after buying 8 sticks (4 now, 4 for spare)

Here's how I am with "supporting developers" whose games I want on my preferred platform:

If I don't want the game itself, I won't support it. Full stop.

If I do want to "show support" for the developers, AND it's a game I want, I'll likely buy it at launch to signal my interest. In general, I like to wait for sales and/or draw from my backlog, If Catherine was from a company that has already seen strong success on the Switch, I might wait a few months to see if the price might drop a bit. But since I want to signal my interest in Atlus releasing their games on Switch anyway, I'll take the hit and buy it at launch.

Anyone who doesn't want it shouldn't buy it. Buying Catherine isn't going to bring Persona games to the Switch.

@NEStalgia
Lol first time I played it I thought it was wack. I had NO idea it was a puzzle game going in. I thought it was an RPG social/sim. Oh boy was I in for a surprise. I wasn’t catching on very well at the puzzles and that left a sour taste in my mouth too.

That said, I did like a lot of it and given how much I love Pushmo, I bought it again on PS4 when the Full Body Edition released. Already owned on 360 for BC via X1 and on Steam. But I never played that version because soon after they announced the Switch version, and I figured I’d get that to play instead (and that was the last time I bought a PS4 game and wanted to slap myself for not waiting- that was the game that finally made me draw a line in the sand and say no exceptions until the end of the generation and I’m 100% sure the game isn’t being ported).

Anyways though, it’s got the same art style and story telling style of Persona. Great cutscenes and art style. Love that. Great story. And even though it didn’t click with me right off the bat the gameplay looks good because it is like Pushmo, which I adore. My problem was more... expectations. I had expectations of some thing else. Now that I’ve kind of digested that and come to accept what type of game it is, it’s appealing to me. I didn’t fully understand what I was doing the first time I played it but now that I’ve watched more gameplay and I have a better grasp of how the gameplay works, i’m confident I’m going to enjoy it quite a bit.

It’s all about knowing what you’re buying (which admittedly I did not when I played the 360 version, but I got it for $5 on a whim because I’d heard people rage about it for so long).

@Ralizah
Well put.

I will support games sometimes in ways...better explained by people here. I did this the most on the Wii and DS, and it mostly worked out really well for me (including 3 of the best games I've ever played in one year, that sadly combined sold less than a million).

But boy am I sick of nonsense of companies pulling this (and many things!). Yes, obviously, it makes more sense to put more games on a system where your games are selling on it. But expecting every single one of your games to have the same audience is dumb at best. The example I always remember is when Ubisoft told people that if they wanted Beyond Good and Evil 2 to exist they had to support Rayman Origins and later Rayman Legends. Because co-op 2d platformers, one of which started as a Wii U exclusive, have the exact same audience as story driven action adventure games (no chance Beyond Good and Evil 2 will be on a Nintendo system any time soon, no matter how much Nintendo fans supported these games btw :V). Quite frankly, I'm probably one of the few people on Earth that loves both Rayman Legends and Beyond Good and Evil.

@kkslider5552000
I don’t think you’re the only one. I think there’s a lot of people who enjoy both of those games. But I agree the sequel probably isn’t coming to Nintendo, but then again, some games are just outside the scope of a handheld system. There are a number of games like that where we can reasonably conclude they won’t come over simply because they would be too much for the system without looking like Outer Worlds.

I think it’s nonsensical to hold a different game ransom for sales of an unrelated game. Having said that, don’t believe that’s what companies are doing a lot of times. I think what they do is they take an unrelated game and they compare the sales on a relative basis to the sales of the same game on different platforms to gauge the level of demand for software on the system as a whole. Is it a perfect predictor variable? No. But does that mean it has no value whatsoever as a predictor variable? No. It does have value. If you look at switch and you see games are, in general, selling 150 - 200% of the sales on Wii U on average, regardless of genre, then it’s a pretty safe bet for what you can expect with a Wii U port. Genres will have various levels of demand that fluctuate from platform to platform, but not by that much. Relative comparisons can still be made as a reasonable means of prediction within a given margin of error. Aside from anomalies such as hyper-budget realism on power platforms doing much better than on Nintendo, the percentage of sales for games across platforms should mostly be predictable, all other factors being held equal (like port quality and release timing).

And that’s just smart business.

It's probably not what most are doing, but it has happened enough that some people do expect it to be happening. There are some people advocating buying Catherine to show Atlus that their games will sell on Switch. Maybe not so much here on the forums, but definitely has popped up in the comment sections here under various headlines and on other sites too. I'm not going to go dredging those sections for them, though
This does not mean in any way that Atlus is actually doing this (for all we know, Catherine could be a runaway hit on Switch and they still don't bring the Persona game people want so badly), but the very idea had to come from somewhere and some sort of precedent set, like from the aforementioned Ubisoft doing it and I know I've seen a couple other developers dance around this in interviews.
It's stating the obvious when a developer says if game x does well, we'll consider game x part 2. That's a pretty direct correlation. But, it really rubs me the wrong way when those few devs play that game of buy game x and we'll consider game y thats a different genre and totally unrelated.