Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

@JaxonH It's definitely not cheap. In Canada the 512GB model with the SSD is the exact price of getting a PS5 console with the disc drive, but for what it is I was honestly anticipating way worse

As far as handheld PCs go this is seriously impressive stuff for the price. It even packs in stuff like gyroscopic controls and the touchpad setup of the Steam controller from before for stuff like RTS games. Stuff like this is practically unheard of for handheld PCs or portable Steam consoles. The closest thing we had to this before was that Steamboy console from a few years ago and that thing was barely portable and expensive as all hell

It's not going to replace my Switch at all, especially since I love the exclusive games on that console, but for people who say, only game on Switch and want a taste of stuff that Steam has to offer like the best versions of multiplats or the Steam sales, in addition to being able to play games that will probably never get ported to Switch, this is seriously cool

@TheFrenchiestFry
Couldn’t agree more.

And I think it will be a gateway drug into PC gaming for a lot of people. There is still that fear of PC gaming being too much tinkering and not easy to buy and play, Which were valid complaints not that long ago in the past. But PC gaming has come so far since then, it really is almost like playing on a console now. But try telling somebody that and they’re skeptical. This will show people just how seamless and smooth PC gaming is. People will get to experience firsthand how incredible it is to play any game, pick your frame rate, resolution and Low/Medium/High/Ultra settings depending on YOUR desires for performance and battery life, hit the home button in any game and map mouse to gyro for immediate gyro aiming in 5 seconds, load community configs within seconds… Once people experience it for themselves, I think they’ll want to go all in on a desktop PC. Especially since it would mean hybrid gaming for steam when used in conjunction with Steam Deck.

Obviously it’s not as smooth as console gaming. You run into the occasional issue or niggle here and there (more so for old games). But people will also realize, even when that happens, it’s not the end of the world and usually you can address whatever needs fixing in a few minutes. Once you get a game set up the first time it’s good to go forever. Next time you start the game up it will automatically load the controller config you were using last time, it’ll automatically have all the settings from the first time you set it up… it’s just like a console.

There’s never been a better time to get into PC gaming with Steam. Switch/PC (and by extension Steam Deck) are the ultimate pair of platforms to own. Especially if you get a desktop connected to your TV like a console so you can go hybrid like Switch. Full 4k 60fps with gyro on the tv, full 720p 60fps with gyro on the go.

To be fair the OLED screen in is around ~$10US additional and the dock is maybe another ~$50US. The bulk of the cost would be in the APU, the cooling and the 16GB of RAM. I also suspect that they're wearing the cost on the 64GB SKU but are making it back on the 256/512GB SKUs which are the SKUs most people are going to pick up.

And given this is the Switch thread, Nintendo could compete against this hardware at a lower cost. They don't have to push anywhere near as hard because for console games there's less overhead. They could go with 8GB rather than 16GB without it hurting much. They could go for a raw performance closer to ~1TFLOPS and squeeze an output that looks better via hardware specific optimisation and DLSS. They could do that with an OLED screen and a dock and hit $400US

Lastly, I kinda see this as another early attempt at this idea. The Nvidia Shield was probably the earliest reasonable attempt to tackle this idea back in 2013. Nintendo made it mainstream and GPDWin pushed the hardware from another angle. Meanwhile AMD has been making increasingly more efficient x86 CPUs and we're getting things like DLSS that improve efficiency on the software side. Meanwhile there's a push for dynamic resolutions in games and games targeting different specs.

What was possible in 2013 was a decent proof of concept, in 2017 Nintendo improved on that concept. This 2021 product looks very nice for sure but.... what will 2023,5,7 look like? Watch this space ey?

I think its more that no matter what potential it has, I just don't have much faith on it going anywhere. We can talk about its value or even logical reasons why a large audience might want it, but if enough people don't gravitate towards it, its just not gonna be that big a deal.

I mean, anything can happen. Switch made 3rd party support relevant on a Nintendo system again and it could play games fairly well that I couldn't possibly imagine it would have, and other things about Switch going against everything I thought I knew (the same year Nier:Automata became a massive success, another impossible thing that happened). I'm just saying it will be a legit surprise if its a huge hit, no matter how good or worth buying for a large audience it may be.

That being said...

...I would laugh pretty hard if it unintentionally became Vita 2, but far more successful. Especially if it gets more first party Sony support than the Vita ever did.

@skywake
Exciting time to be a gamer

@kkslider5552000
I don't think anyone is expecting console like sales. So we have to define "successful". To Valve, 5 million sold would be incredibly successful. 10 million would be astonishing. 15 million would be a paradigm shift.

The best part about Steam Deck, is it doesn't need 100 million sales to justify its existence. Unlike dedicated consoles, it's simply a variant form factor of a much larger ecosystem. Heck, as long as they're not actively losing money in the final analysis, it doesn't really need to do anything except bring brand awareness and build loyalty with the customers who are interested.

But judging by the response, this thing is definitely gonna meet Valve's expectations, of that I'm confident. My question is how much farther can it go? 🤔 Not that it matters, for the aforementioned reasons. It's more of a curiosity than a concern.

I mean technically it's also the first "mass-market" portable "console" with Halo on it

In a normal world yes, but people are weird. If it doesn't live up to actual major, successful console sales, enough people will dismiss it. I don't know why, but that's just how it works. I think people genuinely want this to be serious competition to the Switch.

Though to be fair, Xbox One has always felt like a failure to me (and considering how much Xbox has done to make themselves relevant this gen, I'm not sure I'm wrong), despite it selling 40+ million copies. Though to be fair, unlike Xbox, Valve isn't trying to be competition like that.

@kkslider5552000
Thing is, console manufacturers have to sell large numbers of units to get and maintain developer interest. That's not an issue for Steam because they already have 120mill active users. PC is already the default release platform for most titles, even "console exclusives".

Also if they do move 5mill units that does put a bit of a dent in the Steam hardware stats. Currently Linux is under 1% of all active users on Steam. 5mill Steam Decks would push that up to around 5%. Also currently the majority of the popular GPUs people have are a good 2X above the raw spec of the Steam Deck. 5mill sales would put another GPU with this lower spec into the top 10 GPUs Steam users are running.

That's enough I think to make Devs at the very least look at how well their game runs through Proton. If not release a Linux native version. Especially given that these users are, almost by definition, more willing to spend money on gaming. A lot of current Steam users are going to be significantly more casual users than the people who buy Steam Deck would be.

I see the Steam Deck compared to Switch as being much like the various Google/Microsoft phones compared to the iPhone. They exist to advertise an ecosystem and push adaptation of standards to blaze a trail - partly by selling well below cost to highlight how “poor value” the market leader is - but without ever really being intended to be a multi million seller in and of itself.

Is it great value? Clearly. Could/would Valve be willing to subsidise such a low price over 10-20 million units? Probably not.

I’d also say that it’s interesting how when the Switch was first announced the gaming bubble jumped in to declare that battery life would be terrible but this isn’t even part of the conversation with Valves device. People tend to compare the stats they want to make the point they want to make. “This is just £50 more expensive than Switch OLED but far more powerful!” could easily become “This is just £50 cheaper that Steam Deck but has a battery life that lasts 5 times as long!”.

@StuTwo People were also complaining about the screen quality and resolution, but not here.

And this is even a 7inch screen with bezels, same quality as a basic Switch with odd aspect ratios that will add black bars to some games that can't do 1280*800.

But nah, that's fine.

Umm, what? You think Android devices sell well bellow cost just to push the Android ecosystem as a standard? And that this is some kind of "out of spite" thing to push back against the iPhone? Well ok then. I mean the comparison doesn't even really make that much sense because Apple generally puts relatively premium silicon in their flagship phones. Very strange take....

I think it's a pretty large part of the discussion from what I've seen. Every second naysayer is talking about this 2-8 hours of battery life. This despite the fact that Nintendo's stated battery life for the original Switch was 2.5-6.5hours and yet somehow we lived with that. And the Wii U GamePad which had a battery life of 3-5 hours which was the same as the rated battery life of the original 3DS.

Yet you know, this Valve device is somehow completely unusable because it lists 2-8hours expected battery life. I mean, I don't know about you but I never really hit the limit of the Wii U GamePad's battery and only occasionally hit the limit of the 3DS. The Switch I don't think I've ever hit it. So I don't see an issue with 2-8hours.

..... and the people who complained about the Switch only having a 720p display were equally as wrong as anyone complaining about the resolution of this device now. Bit of a double standard you guys have I think. Nobody can fault the Switch for these things, and I agree, but somehow they should be complaining about the Steam Deck for the same things? At least be consistent guys.

Also 16:10, most games accommodate this aspect ratio on PC. There are occasional console ports that don't but generally it's not at all an issue and when it is at most it's just some black bars in cutscenes. source: I used a 16:10 aspect ratio monitor for years

@skywake I don’t think that Android devices sell below cost “out of spite” or any such thing.

Devices like the Google Nexus line though (and the Pixel line to an extent) were different though - they were never intended to sell more than the iPhone (or more than the Galaxy line from Samsung) or anything like that - they were deliberate attempts to say “hey - this is what an Android phone can be” and Google did take a hit doing that (in the sense that they were selling a product without a profit margin relative to that which Apple was reaping).

The great success of that approach was that it got a number of enthusiast “influencers” (ambassadors might be a better term!) using Android who might not otherwise have been swayed from iPhone. It set a standard for other manufacturers to follow.

I see the Steam Deck as being a similar marketing proposition.

I also don’t see battery life as an issue here (having never had a problem with the Switch either) - although I do think that it’s not been a major part of the early discussion with the Deck so far. That discussion at this point is focused much more firmly on how much more powerful and how much more of a great deal it is versus the Switch OLED (which in many ways it clearly is).

I was just pointing out that there are other possible takes. The market at large might not see things in the same way as the echo chamber on gaming websites - important though these are.

@StuTwo
I think we'll have to agree to disagree in terms of battery life not being part of the discussion for the Steam Deck. It's literally all over the discussion, every thread I've been in for this on multiple forums has someone complaining about the minimum 2 hours battery. But in any case, the battery life isn't all that bad when you really think about it.

As I said the original Switch was rated for 2.5-6.5 hours battery with that 2.5 hours being for games like Breath of the Wild. This thing is being rated for 2-8 hours with them making a point of saying Portal 2 will hit around 4 hours but if you limit it to 30fps you'll get 6 hours out of it. Which to me reads as the kinds of games that will demand enough of this to fall bellow the Switch's battery life could not run on Switch. Lighter games will likely last longer than they would have on the OG Switch.

This is SO true. With the internet and social media these days, I feel like a lot of products died early deaths that perhaps wouldn't have happened in the decades prior. I think Wii U was a casualty of this, and I think if the Gamecube launched during the time of social media, it too would have met an untimely fate.

But it's not just Nintendo consoles. Plenty of other consoles have come and (quickly) gone (Ouya? Stadia? lol), many times, I believe, because it just never catches hold with the internet/social media crowd and becomes a pariah to millions of gamers simply because of some forums and message boards and such.

So far, from what I'm seeing, the Steam Deck has a push behind it on the internet that I haven't seen with other recent failed hardware.

@DomGC Pretty sure the situation is that Europe has laws such that RRP is literally just a recommendation so retailers which aren't Nintendo's own stores can price games below RRP. NA doesn't have that so Nintendo can force retailers in NA to price them at a certain price.

But that is a fraction of the expected battery life of the same games on the OLED edition or even the 2.0 Switch - more pertinent points of comparison because you can’t buy a new OG Switch in the shops anymore and haven’t been able to for some time.

In general I do agree with you - anything over 2 hours between charges is “good enough” for a device like this. I don’t think I’ve ever personally run up against my Switch battery running out.

I do however continue to differ with you in that think that it’s very marked that articles on the Steam Deck so far have glanced over the issue of battery life whilst articles on the Switch prior to launch (let alone forum discussions!) quickly focused heavily on it as a reason the console would fail. Some of that is just good marketing from Valve and the different nature of the specific market they are targeting, the types of specs they’ve already publicly released etc.

I think they’ll have a lot of success with the Steam Deck because it looks like a great device.

Ultimately though I think that success will look like Microsoft’s success with the Surface in that the real success will be lower spec third party devices following in its wake. Some of those will be awful - or at best OK (and few professional reviewers or enthusiasts will ever use those over the high end flagship from Valve themselves) but those are the devices that could sell hundreds of millions of units.

Ok, let's talk battery life.

Wii U gamepad was a massive problem for me. Constantly having to plug it in, so I bought the extended life battery that pushed it to 6 hrs.

Original Switch wasn't great, and it did die on me a number of times, but it was usable. Most heavy games could push 3 hrs (like Zelda) which isn't ideal but, it worked.

As soon as v2 Switch released I was on it, as were many others. 4.5 to 5 hrs as a baseline minimum for even the heaviest games on max brightness? That is more like it.

2 hrs, on the other hand, is much different than 3 or even 2.5. I own a GPD Win 2. Getting 120 minutes on a game isn't fun. And I'll be the first to say, 2 hrs doesn't cut it for me. That's one of the main reasons I don't use my Win 2 anymore (that and no gyro).

Thankfully, because this is a more powerful system that gets low battery life on higher settings, you can optimize here to push that to 3 hrs for heavy games. Instead of 720p, run 600p. Go 30fps locked instead of 60fps. And keep settings on low. Maybe dim brightness a tick or two. You learn the tricks of the trade being a low spec gamer. The Win 2 didn't have much room to optimize because games were already running at the lowest framerate and settings. Steam Deck has some room to negotiate, even if it's just to squeeze an extra 45 minutes.

If Portal 2 gets about 4 hrs at 60fps, then many of the more demanding games will be in the 2-3 hr range. But that's just the reality of handheld PCs. These games are not designed to run in low power state like Switch. You're lugging a literal PC around as a handheld and the power draw will be exactly what you'd expect.

So while it can run anything for the most part, if you pick and choose games with settings optimized for low spec systems that at least maximize battery life consumption, you'll probably get more mileage. That's how I did it with Win 2 (though it’s lack of gyro really led to me sticking with Switch in the end, it’s still a great clamshell machine for Dolphin emulator- a portable GameCube and Wii).

@JaxonH Speaking of battery life, I'm assuming this thing has to run on X86 right? Doesn't that usually mean 3-10x the power draw of a game that's running on ARM?

I've got two Nintendo Switch Game Vouchers sat on my account and I'm toying with the idea of Skyward Sword HD despite hating OoT/MM/TP, but enjoying Wind Waker a bit.

It's that or Mario Golf and everyone seems to say that's crap too 😂

@Haruki_NLI
Mario Golf is fun. The course designs are more realistic like Wii Sports but it's great fun.

Skyward Sword is better though, imo. It's a must-own. Watch the Digital Foundry review for all the improvements.

@link3710
I don't know the ratio, but games built for PC have high power draw. On my Win 2, stock power is 7 Watts, similar to Switch handheld. You can increase it to whatever you want- I made profiles for 8W, 10W, 12W and 15W. And many games on that device, like Fallout 4, needed 15W to run, even at low settings. And that destroyed battery life and it got super hot, so I never used those high power settings.

But this device is using new architecture that's much more efficient, and, it runs up to 15 Watts. Which means it can actually run those big AAA games and still get 2-3 hrs without burning your hands (in fact, IGN says the handle area where you hold it doesn't get hot at all, which is amazing).

So ya, to run modern AAA games you need 20 watts or more on Win Max, but 15 should be ok with lower settings and resolution. Which for most APUs isn't feasible without insane battery use and heat output. But thanks to newer Zen architecture here it's actually able to do 15 Watts and actually get more than 70 minutes playtime.