Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

@skywake Can I ask what that last one is? Is Median the Switch successor rumours?

@skywake
That's good stuff. I love data- helps us make more informed decisions.

The data does seem to suggest a 6 month lead time. No questioning that. Data doesn't lie. The question is, does that trend still hold? Trends can only be predictive if the trend is still valid.

I believe the Switch is the first system to still be selling so strongly going into its 7th year. So I wonder... in generations past, perhaps they could afford a longer spread between announcement and release because sales were dwindling, thus the sales impact from an announcement was smaller. Whereas with Switch, they are in, as they put it, "uncharted waters", with the system still selling just under 20m units per year.

Will that affect the trend? I think it could and likely will. But, I could also be wrong. When forming one's opinion on this matter, what it really boils down to is whether or not one believes that trend still holds true for Switch despite its continued sales dominance, and whether or not they're willing to jeopardize that.

I'm not married to my opinion. If I hear a compelling argument as to why the trend will still hold, I'll update my beliefs accordingly.

@JaxonH Ah, okay.

@skywake i expect Nintendo to anounce it next hardware around june/august time for a holiday 2023 release or a spring 2024 release(problaby march/april), we problaby gonna see some cross-gen games for two/tree year, before games focused on the Nintendo next hardware will be released, kinda like Sony did with PS5, with some cross-gen games with PS4 before they focus now fully with games made to focus on it lastest hardware, i believe that what Shuntaro Furukawa refered as to do a smooth transition for it next hardware, since they cant rely on another console, if the Nintendo Switch sucessor fail.

I am once again posting my absolutely correct take on this. Whenever Nintendo is planning to release a new Switch, I want them to release it later than that. You will not change my mind on this.

@kkslider5552000 I'm Kermit1... hi... I didn't get tagged for this, interesting.

You have some great points btw

I don't think that's a "power" thing so much as it is a "chasing reality" thing.

The long cycles are typical of AAA development for titles chasing realism. Obviously that's not always the case 100% of the time, but generally speaking I believe that to be the case.

The big jump for Nintendo occurred during the SD-HD transition. I don't expect the HD-UHD transition to be anywhere near as impactful. Until and unless their games start chasing realism, motion capture for big name actors and half billion dollar budgets for games that must sell 10 million copies just to be profitable, I don't expect any notable difference for Switch 2 games. 1st party dev times should stay relatively constant, and if anything, we should see development times decrease for 3rd party games as extreme optimization to hit a stable framerate is no longer required, or is required to a much lesser extent.

@JaxonH development for Nintendo Switch sucessor will be more expensive, no matter if Nintendo dont chase realism or others trends, it will be more expensive because Nintendo first party studios will try to do more ambitous games like Bayonetta 3, Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, theses games take a lot of resouces/time to be made, if the Switch sucessor have PS4 specs as the Nvidia leaks seen to confirm, this would take more development time, a sequel to Legend of zelda Tears of the Kingdom is expected to release on Switch sucessor only on 2028/2030, mid AA would take less time to develop, but more ambitous games such as a 2D/3D Mario, 2D/3D Legend of Zelda or Metroid would surely take more time to develop/release, game development is becoming much more time/resourching consuming, Shiya Takahashi has stated this to investor during one of the 2021 investor meeting,

@Giancarlothomaz
I'm not denying that. I'm saying the increase will be reasonably small and mostly negligible. They're already making massive games. The only real difference would be more detailed textures, which ok, it takes a bit more time. So they hire an extra 5 workers. Problem solved.

The seriously long dev times aren't because PS4 level power vs Switch magically doubles development time. It doesn't. The long dev times come from massive AAA games and pursuing the bottomless pit of hyper-detailed graphics, not slightly more detailed textures at higher resolution in a game. Does it increase it some? Sure. But not that much.

The big jump was from standard def to HD, and from dated tools on old architecture to current tools on modern architecture. As long as games aren't chasing AAA with extreme realism with motion capture and pores on the skin with facial fuzz and hundreds if not thousands of NPCs and realistic traffic patterns and ridiculous details like horse testicles growing and shrinking... there's not gonna be some major difference.

You bring up Bayonetta and yet it's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Platinum has made similar games for PS4, such as Nier Automata. Did "having PS4 power" drastically alter the game they created? Nope. In fact, it's able to run on Switch! And does so very well, in fact! Bayonetta being developed on "PS4 power hardware" would likely be no different than Nier Automata, which in turn isnt really different than the Bayonetta we currently have. Gamers get it in their minds that if a studio "just had more power" their games would see this elaborate difference, as if they'd suddenly start cranking out hyper-detailed AAA games... they won't. They'll make the same games they've always made. They'll just look a little cleaner, a little more detailed, and run at 60fps with higher resolution.

@JaxonH i see, knowing Nintendo and they focus on gameplay, they will use a more powerful arquiture to allow for more ambitous games to be developed on it next hardware, ideas they coundt do, now they can like a open world 3D Mario

@Giancarlothomaz @JaxonH I'll put it this way chaps.

Miyamoto said that BOTW would need to sell 2m units to be profitable. This at the time was their biggest game, long development time, new tools, R&D, 300 employees. At $60 a pop? 2 million units puts it at $120 million including marketing and distribution etc.

Think about that. Profit on their biggest game at 2 million. Most companies say they need 5 million if not more.

However, remember Nintendo has many games that are in essence "pure profit" very quickly, but unlike other companies they are good at diversity in where those profits go.

So all the money from Animal Crossing isn't going into the next one. It's going into Bayonetta, Advance Wars, smaller sellers to broaden the appeal of the hardware library.

Other companies live almost "paycheque to paycheque" as it were, where every game is so expensive with so much manpower and marketing and time that the money it makes has to go into exclusively the next thing.

@Haruki_NLI
Fair observation.

I also find it interesting that all other companies scramble to release their games and more times than not they're broken or buggy (TLOU pt 1 on PC, RE4 on PS4, two examples just from the last month alone).

But with Nintendo, they're in no rush. They finish games and shelf them for 6-30 months until they feel it's the opportune time to release. They never have to scuttle to release a game because they've always got half a dozen more fully complete waiting in the bullpen.

I remember in the Wii U era, 2015 and 2016 were pretty dry (2016 most of all), but I remember thinking, "they're saving up games in the background so that they can get enough inventory of games built up they can release a steady cadence next gen". And that price we paid then (and it was painful at the time) is now paying us dividends today.

@JaxonH This is the company that, to our knowledge, shelved New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, Mario Maker 2, Advance Wars, Metroid Prime, Fire Emblem Engage, Pikmin 3 Deluxe and probably more....until they needed them. No other company does that.

This is also the company that has funded and openly restarted development on many games, with one now in what we can assume is its 7th year of development. Most companies would take the loss but to Nintendo its worth it because the money from other games subsidises a more niche game taking this long just because its healthier for their platform to have variety.

And thats incredibly smart. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe sells 50m units? That's just funded countless smaller games, not the next Mario Kart. That game is a given, all these other games weren't, but the money from 8 Deluxe isnt needed to fund a new one.

What are the odds the Super Mario Bros. Movie somehow ends up on the Eshop?

@FragRed
Median = "the middle one". It's the difference between "on average people" and "the average person". Says what's typical without being skewed by the outliers

@Colonel_Mustache & @JaxonH
The GB -> GBA transition is probably the closest to the Switch in terms of sales momentum. Which is why that gap between the initial rumours and the actual release is as insane as it is. It came out later that they had the GBA and GBC in development simultaneously and were, presumably, considering doing something not unlike what they did with the DS and GB Micro. But their market dominance and, presumably, the massive boost in sales from Pokemon had them push back the release of their ARM portable

The parallel is that the "Switch Pro" rumours started to really gain steam in early 2021 with Bloomberg's articles. How much of that was actually new hardware development leaks and how much of it was just Switch OLED? We may never know. But what we do know is that Switch has market dominance and the past few years have been rough in terms of getting supply of components. It may well turn out that the Switch OLED and "Switch 2" were in development in parallel and because of the Switch's reaching even higher highs when COVID hit they decided to put the more updated hardware on ice for a bit

The one thing that I think has most definitely changed is the speed that information spreads. The only way anyone knew about this stuff even into the mid 2000s was if they were a dedicated enough gamer to buy a gaming magazine. The main way people found out there was new hardware when the GBA/GC released was through official advertising in physical stores. The release cycle back then was MUCH more controlled and MUCH slower

With "Switch 2", people already expect new hardware to come out next year and Nintendo hasn't said anything. Which suggests that they need to announce it earlier to regain control of the narrative. Which is what they did with the Wii U and 3DS announcements. This is why the "pre-full reveal" times for Wii U were so incredibly short. And even with the full reveal, as soon as you say something.....

We already have people posting on here asking "should I get a Switch OLED or wait for Switch 2" and Nintendo hasn't even said anything. Imagine how loud that thought will get when they actually drop a trailer on YouTube? So they'd want to minimise the time between the announcement and release and, really, they can do this anyways because information travels fast

The paradox of modern software development. The easier it has become to build stuff the more complicated the projects became. The bigger the projects the harder they are to manage

Earlier games were much closer to "one developer projects" than what we have now. Very low level, very manual, very slow work. But because of that and also the lack of power to do much else at a high level they weren't very complicated. If something broke the solution would be something like "my maths must be wrong in this function" or "I must be pointing to the wrong bit of memory"

These days? Much easier to write code. You're going to be importing pre-written libraries for most of the lower level stuff anyways. Also, development has significant amounts of automation already, especially in terms of testing. Side note, this is why if you ask a developer about AI taking their job they'll laugh at you because a developer's main job has always been to try and automate jobs.

Anyways, making it easier to write code? Means more is written. Abstracting stuff out? Well that means there's more "surface area" where things interact. More power/storage? Means you're pushing more different things through your methods. Also because more stuff is being written? There are more different things to keep track of. Bugs in modern code is less about "my maths is wrong in that method" and more about "this group of methods have a strange interaction when you put this particular set of data through it"

..... that sort of thing is MUCH harder to track down and impossible to keep track of. So a lot of time in development is spent trying to keep that under control. Which significantly slows down development

@Colonel_Mustache
At the end of the day it doesn't really matter. We're just speculating for entertainment.

Bottom line is, Switch 2 will most likely be released by this time next year. Maybe it comes during the holidays. Maybe it releases in March like Switch and 3DS (my guess). Maybe they tease in October. Maybe they don't.

The one takeaway that matters here is that it's highly likely Switch 2 is 12 months away, at most. Obviously even that could prove wrong, but at this point, having seen the sales slip to 18 mil and change last year, knowing this year might be 15-17, I can't imagine they want to push it out to 2025 when Switch sales could dip into single digit millions, and risking consumer mindshare plummeting before it releases.

They said they learned a lesson from Wii, and have indicated they want to take more of a Sony approach in generational transition (I'm paraphrasing here), and that means next gen releases while the iron is still hot and engagement is still high, and that means making your last year a banger. And I think we see that with a new Fire Emblem, Metroid Prime, a new Zelda, a new Pikmin, and whatever else they have planned for the rest of 2023.

@Colonel_Mustache
Mmm... it's definitely the biggest example, but I'd argue there were others.

When PSone dropped and hit 100m units the same generation N64 did just 1/3 of that... I'd argue that's an iterative failure. And of course when PS2 dropprd and hit 155m units the same generation GameCube did just 1/8 of that... I'd argue that's an iterative failure also.

GameCube sold 7-8 million more than Wii U, which ain't much. And the N64 only sold 32 million, heck even the SNES only sold 40 million! NES gets a pass at 60 million because at the time that was huge. And I suppose SNES gets a pass too because it was competing against the Genesis which took half it's marketshare in the US.

But ya, Nintendo consoles were in iterative decline ever since the SNES.

NES- 60m
SNES- 40m (33% less)
N64- 32m (20% less)
GC- 21m (34% less)
Wii- 101m ANOMOLY
WiiU- 13m (38% less)
NSW- 120m + DOWNWARD TREND BROKEN

I'd argue the SNES performed as well as the NES. The N64 was a backwards step with the same approach as was the GC. The Wii was technically the most iterative console Nintendo has ever done but marketing wise it clearly wasn't. And it paid off. The Wii U was superficially very different but was marketed as another Wii and failed

The Switch? In a superficial sense it's the Wii U again, right down to the games, but technically it's the first major shift in hardware since the GC and GBA respectively. The real change though is purely in the demographic they targeted with their marketing. The most dramatic shift in target market since the Wii/DS

As interesting as hardware is really the main game here is how people perceive your platform. Ultimately that's all that matters. As much as that annoys the hell out of me as someone who likes to try and look at things objectively. People pick consoles like how teenagers pick favourite bands or boomers pick political parties. It's an identity not a mechanical decision

So the question is, do Nintendo stick with this new market they've found? Will the demographic who found Nintendo with Switch stick around? Or will they drop it like they did with Wii?

That's a very interesting take. Most people are predicting late 2024 or even 2025.

I could see arguments to either point. In favor of a late 2023 or early 2024 launch like you mentioned, console sales are decreasing. The Switch replaces both consoles and handhelds for Nintendo — Nintendo consoles have unfortunately usually floundered a year or so before the successor's release, but Nintendo portables have usually been supported Playstation-style up until the successor's release if not later (Pokemon comes to mind). DLC for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe suspiciously ends before the end of 2023. With handhelds, they have consistently released an significantly updated version about 2 years (not exactly but more or less) before the successor — GB Color came out in 1998, GBA came out 2001; GBA SP came out early 2003, DS came out late 2004; DSi came out 2009, 3DS came out 2011; New 3DS came out 2015, Switch came out 2017. By that logic, Switch OLED release in 2021 would line up with a Switch 2 release in 2023 or 2024. And I think I saw some rumors say Switch won't be getting any big-name 1st party games in the future after TotK and Pikmin 4 until Switch 2 release (implying Metroid Prime 4 would also launch on Switch 2 perhaps).

But on the other hand, Switch is still selling like crazy, even if it has decreased a little year-over-year — and a new Zelda is about to come out to boost sales even more. If a new system was going to come out this year, wouldn't Tears of the Kingdom been delayed a few more months to be the launch game for Switch 2 and successfully launch the system the way BotW did for Switch 1? Splatoon 3 will be supported until the end of 2024, and it would be strange to have a new system rely on its predecessor's game via BC for a period of time instead of having its own Splatoon game. And the semiconductor shortage and other electronics shortages means Nintendo might be keen to wait as long as possible like how GBA was delayed for some time to ride out the boost in GB sales.

My guess? I think Nintendo will ride out 2023 on the Switch with no Switch 2 announcement to avoid affecting sales (and no price drop either — Switch is still selling plenty at the same price), but will launch Switch 2 in 2024, perhaps mid-to-late 2024.

This is all really interesting because there are so many factors that could affect launch timeline — whether Nintendo lets the Switch run out of steam for a year or so before the successor launches (like previous consoles) or keeps the train running until the successor launches (like previous portables), whether they launch during holidays (previous consoles) or spring (previous portables), whether they are happy with the impressive sales Switch is having this late in its lifespan and genuinely want to push as long as possible before a successor launches like they did with GB or if they want to keep the train running with a successor piggybacking off the Switch success, etc. It'll be very interesting to see what ends up happening.

I'm with @JaxonH in terms of the timeline here. I think late 2023 full reveal and probably some more concrete leaks before we get to that point. Then probably a price drop to the existing Switch to have them ride out the holiday period without much impact to sales. Followed by an early 2024 product release

But I think what we'll see is nothing but silence during the peak of TotK's sales window. Because I would think Nintendo is more concerned about that audience waiting than they are the people who'd be buying over Christmas. Someone picking up a Switch, probably again, for TotK? Make those people wait they probably move on to something else.

The holiday sales are different kinds of purchases. Those sales would be people buying gifts, mostly parents buying for kids. Those purchases won't be impacted anywhere near as much by the announcement of new hardware. They would, however, be impacted by something looking like a "good deal". So price cuts, holiday bundles, that sort of thing