Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

@link3710
Well, they'd bundle it with landline and internet, but the cable portion was $50-60 when I canceled it.

I figure if I have a 4K OLED TV, I'd like to enjoy 4K content on it, so I opted for the 4K tier, which also helps due to quality degradation via streaming. 1080p when streaming appears sub-1080p, and while 4K streaming isn't as good as UltraHD BluRay, it's at least on par with 1080p BluRay, maybe better.

I did drop Disney+ though after watching 2 seasons of The Mandalorian. It felt like paying for EA Play. They just don't have enough content to justify the price.

Amazon Prime though is a must. I was getting the student offer for half price for like 4 years but they just upped my price back to $120/yr. I love the fast, free shipping as I'm constantly ordering small price items. The Video service is just a bonus.

Honestly I think the vast majority of people that have Prime have it for the shipping, not for Prime Video.

Most mainstream anime seems to be available for Hulu and HBO Max, so Funimation/Crunchyroll aren't really necessary unless you're watching something more niche.

Disney+ I don't even pay extra for - it was included as a bonus as part of my phone plan with Verizon

Yeah, I have Crunchyroll atm just to watch Digimon Ghost Game (so good), I'll end that when I catch up and probably jump back to Netflix or something.

...back on the topic of Switch, is there any news on the new Digimon game actually coming out this year?

Yeah, once upon a time you paid like a tenner or whatever for Netflix and that got you the same amount of content that is now like 200 quid a month across 15 individual streaming platforms. Everyone wanting their piece of the pie, partitioning the content into smaller and smaller slices at ever increasing prices.

I think the difference though is generally gaming is a much more expensive hobby than watching TV, even if you have an outdated TV package, you probably still pay less per month for that than you do videogames (unless you only buy like one indie title a month or something). So to me, as it stands right now, if you have Gamepass for the entire year and play three brand new day one releases that year on Gamepass you've already saved money, anything you play in between is a bonus.

But if Sony have a Gamepass and then a Nintendo have a Gamepass then maybe things will become different conversations. But to be fair like EA and Ubisoft and others have had their own subscription services and I don't feel they cause as much disruption as some of the video streaming platforms do. Especially as Gamepass seem to just absorb those smaller ones into their library at no extra cost.

And there is the whole conversation about game ownership, but I feel like with the move to digital storefronts and less of a focus on physical titles, I don't know if physical editions will ever fully go away completely, but I think the traditional concept of "ownership" has already changed and will continue to do so.

To me game ownership in the sense that these people argue just isn't that important to me, anyway. Outside of like live service games/looter/ARPG sorts of games which promote repeated dips, I tend to finish games and never touch then again unless they are truly special. Before COVID I used to effectively just rent all my games, by just constantly trading in a game when I was finished for something else, effectively spending no money.

To me the value is paying as little as I can for a title, rather than having say a physical copy gathering dust in the corner, that is why Gamepass feels like such a good answer for me. Digital gaming can sometimes be more expensive than physical and in some ways gives you less "ownership" making it all feel like a bit of con, really but Gamepass gives me all the convenience of a digital library with a much lower cost. However, that is just me and how I game, I know others are different.

That is why, for my needs, Nintendo can kinda suck for me. Digital Switch games are like crazy expensive, first party stuff rarely goes on sale and even if it does, it is by a tiny amount. It isn't like say PC gaming where you can get deep discounts usually pretty soon afterwards. Some may see that as a good thing, but to me I can spend as much in a year on PC games as I can do in like a month on Switch. I'd love for a Switch Gamepass to play all of those extortionate first parties, but I think Nintendo would lose too much money. Those prices are as high as they are because Nintendo gives you no choice, you pay them or don't play them.

I just find most of these services are not for me. I had HBO Max for a little over a year, and while part of it is that my interest in watching a movie (or watching nearly anything for more than an hour and a half in a row outside of an actual movie theater) has been difficult nowadays for me, I could have watched more stuff. Or watched movies in multiple sessions (which I've done before). But I just didn't. The only one I have now is Netflix, and my brother pays for that one.

And there's just more to a lot of games, just in terms of time spent with them. So a gaming service is largely not for me. (which is why I plan on actively playing a lot more N64 and Genesis games in the near future, than I would have if they were simply bought separately)

Game Pass will likely get a price increase at some point after the Activision acquisition has been finalized. If we look at the day 1 Game Pass 1st party releases over Game Pass' lifespan so far (note that PC Game Pass was introduced in June 2019 so anything released before then will have been console only):

2018

• Sea of Thieves
• State of Decay 2
• Forza Horizon 4

2019

• Crackdown 3
• Gears 5
• Halo Reach (MCC)
• Age of Empires II Definitive Edition [PC only]

2020

• Wasteland Remastered
• Ori and the Will of the Wisps
• Bleeding Edge
• Minecraft Dungeons
• The Bard's Tale Remastered and Resnarkled
• Grounded
• Battletoads
• Tell Me Why
• Wasteland 3
• Gears Tactics
• Gears 5 Hivebusters (DLC expansion got added to Game Pass day 1)
• Age of Empires III Definitive Edition [PC only]
• Flight Simulator [PC only]
• Halo CE, 2, 3, ODST and 4 (MCC) [PC]

2021

• Flight Simulator [console]
• Psychonauts 2
• Forza Horizon 5
• Halo Infinite
• Age of Empires IV [PC only]

I think the current Game Pass pricing meshes with the fact either not many 1st party titles come to Game Pass in a year or in the case of 2020 they are a lot of cheaper priced titles (Gears Tactics and Flight Sim PC were the only full price games that year).

I already see Gamepass going in the wrong direction, to be honest, with it making up for a lack of day one first party with these 3rd party deals where they get mediocre/bad titles from other companies day one instead. If they do the Netflix thing of increasing the price and bloating the platform with filler content, I won't be happy. I think Gamepass could increase the price and the value proposition is there, I just think a properly curated collection of great games, is better than a massive platform of mostly filler like modern Netflix is.

That is sorta why a Switch Gamepass would be both great for the consumer and probably bad for Nintendo. Such a strong first party line up they could offer us via a subscription, but why would they when they get away with selling them at the prices they do?

I think gamepass also works for MS in part because they have been in the business for a shorter period of time. Most of the companies they have made agreements with are likely still in business or they are being bought by MS and MS can also afford to bleed any costs while the ecosystem is built and then do a price creep.

Nintendo has been churning out games for what 4 decades now? A lot of studios have gone under and licenses are in limbo or mothballed and look at NSO how people complain about what games are on the service...aside from first party games any type of Nintendo pass would be more of the same. Plus the work needed for wrapping the roms for emulation has a cost. Before someone pulls the "but free emulators do what Nintendon't!", they also don't have a budget or project timelines. And they got their start reverse engineering the games and systems they emulate with usually no thought or concern to hardware throughput. A game that was only licensed by Nintendo can't be reverse engineered legally. Opensource/pirates can do lots of things because they have free time (which costs money), a limitless resource pool (coders can drop in and out willy nilly...bad from an organization perspective but still something HR has to hire and train for...which costs money), and technically a limitless budget (not saying that these people have the best machines on the planet but if someone wanted to splash out...there is no budget or equipment requisition red tape to go through.)

And right now GPU is at a cheap price...one that even if all Nintendo could do was dump what was in VC (all versions) on to the switch I would be concerned about the ROI for such a thing. Nintendo games sell, at full price, years later... (a great deal of GPU is current games) so that would cut into profits especially if they offer a GPU style discount. Also MS pays devs upfront to be featured on Game Pass, something that I would think would make shareholders nervous (the idea of that makes me nervous) when devs don't really promise dedicated support or it tapers off quickly after initial agreements to Nintendo. MS doesn't have to worry about being snubbed on anything multiplat (and with PC being a MS wheelhouse and sony putting games on PC...they really don't have to worry). Nintendo likes to cultivate devs by giving them projects, but outright acquisitions aren't their thing (with good reason as given their business model it would not be fiscally sound), and considering how they lease out projects rather than getting a ton of custom made games I can't see how going acquisition crazy will help them as they won't acquire a bevy of IP (which is more important than the staff).

Who need Gamepass if I can get the games in physical?

My backlog is largely what keeps me from investing in GP. Why invest in that when I have 100+ games across all of my platforms sitting around unplayed?

With subscription services, I have to play games when they're available, but I like having access to them and playing them whenever.

It is a good value, though. Once I work down my backlog of games, I could see myself just sitting pretty with a GP subscription for years. If nothing else, I'll probably sub whenever I'm able to get around to playing Starfield (dunno if it'll run OK on my increasingly old GPU).

@Grumblevolcano
All subs are bound to increase price eventually, but I'm not worried about Gamepass atm

You can bank up to 3 years, and if you're not currently subscribed, you can buy 3 years Xbox Live Gold on Amazon for $55/yr ($165 total), redeem it, and then subscribe to Gamepass using the $1 for first month offer and it upconverts your Gold membership to Gamepass.

So... you can get 3 full years for $166 right now. And that covers your online access too (obviously). And not have to worry about it again until 2025.

But even at $15/mo, it's a good price. The cost of 3 $60 games per year gives you access to 400+ titles, with different 3rd party on rotation. I think it will eventually be $20/mo, but right now they're trying to gain subscribers, so I don't expect such an increase until they've hit around 50m subs, and even then, they make keep it at $15 and just play the numbers game.

Yeah between the year I spent getting free games on Epic, cheap used games and quality sales, I don't need more games.

That was my rationale for a long time. But the fact is I still buy new games all the time. And if there's a way to try a bunch of games first, and curate that list of purchases, and try a bunch of games I may not have committed to buying but am interested in trying if I have access, that seems like a reasonable proposition to me... for the price, anyways.

If it was $50/mo then I'd say screw that. But at less than $55/yr? Shoot, why not. Even with hundreds of games in backlog, it's so cheap there's really no reason not to. I had Psychonauts 2 on my Steam wishlist. But now I'll probably just play on Gamepass. It Takes Two is a game I wouldn't buy, but since it's on Gamepass, I can play it with my brother. The Ascent was a game I heard great things about. Same for A Plague Tale: Innocence and The Medium and Greedfall. Now I can try them all out. I can play Windjammers 2 while I wait for the LRG Switch release. And for games I own on Steam that don't need gyro, like Batman Arkham Knight and Nier Automata and Gears Tactics, I can more easily play them on Series X now with quick resume and turning TV on automatically, rather than the much more involved process of playing on PC. And games like Pillars of Eternity 2, which don't have good controller support on Steam, I can now play better on Xbox. And Kingdom Hearts 3 isn't yet on Steam so it's good having access to that. Can try Rainbow Six Extraction which just released and see if its worth a buy on Steam later.

So I guess it's not really about "need" for me. It's more about "want".

Also, having access to cloud versions of every game on Gamepass is something I didn't realize would be so useful. A lot of games have very large file sizes. Rather than commit to download, it's so easy to just select the cloud icon instead and immediately try the game out first before downloading, just to get a feel for whether it's a game I want to bother playing in the first place. Being able to do the same on my phone in a controller grip is even cooler.

The biggest downside is no gyro on Xbox. So shooters are pretty much a no-go across the board. Fine for trying out and sampling to decide whether to buy on Steam, but not for actually playing through. So Halo, Gears of War, Doom, Wolfenstein, Outer Worlds, etc are pretty much Steam and/or Switch only.

I basically only get Game Pass when the 1-dollar trial becomes available again

Last time I only used it try Forza Horizon 5 a bit. Hah it took longer to download than what I spent playing it.

@kkslider5552000 I feel like, for normal people, this is a no-brainer. But for me, someone who has spent years wastefully buying games on sale and then not playing/finishing them, I've accrued my own personal GP. Besides, with GP, you inevitably have a bunch of stuff you don't want, and unless it's first-party, you don't know when it'll disappear from the service until a couple of weeks beforehand (although, at the rate Microsoft is gobbling up the rest of the industry, that might not be much of a problem in a few years!).

I do sub to PS+, but those games are accessible as long as I'm a subscriber if I redeem them, so, in a sunk cost fallacy sorta way, it feels more worth the money to me.

I'm sure I'll get lured into the GP honeypot either way. Maybe after Starfield releases, if that doesn't just turn out to be vaporware.

I think Game Pass is easily the best value in gaming right now, but as someone that also has a huge backlog on Switch, I have more than enough to play as it is.

The value for Game Pass will become even more pronounced as Microsoft's acquisitions actually start to bare fruit over the next few years though. We haven't really seen much come out of those yet beyond better budgets for Forza Horizon and Psychonauts 2.

Anyone here have a rough idea about when the Legends Arceus reviews will be going up across the publication sites like IGN, Eurogamer and, of course, NLife? I'm trying to not be swayed by any reviews/previews so if anyone could give me a rough idea on when to 'tab out' so to speak, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

@Fizza If you don't know already. Wednesday

@MsJubilee Thank you! I'll see you all later then!

3 days away from Legends Arceus launch and its already #1 in the UK eshop charts, may have obtained #1 earlier given I didn't use my Switch much the past few days so I didn't check the eshop.