Nintendo 'Must Keep Up' With Cloud Tech, But Sees Further Potential In Dedicated Hardware

Fine with me. I don't give a crap about cloud and such. The most online stuff I ever did with Nintendo hardware is eshop, Pokemon trading and the occasional Splatoon round.

The day cloud based gaming takes over is the day I stop playing new titles

"while cloud gaming has enormous potential, it relies on a very strong network infrastructure and excellent reception"

For a lot of places, the infrastructure is not yet ready, and won't be anytime in the foreseeable future. We are going to be rocking dedicated hardware for quite some time (although I think companies are going to try to force digital downloads more and more).

Have used geoforce Now on my PC with some really good results. Can see a future in it but being the tech dinosaur I am, I'm not looking forward to it. Give me physical games and consoles any day... Grumble grumble change... Grumble grumble young people... Grumble grumble technology...

I will NEVER care about streaming only games.
I will QUIT from future gaming like that.
They are SUCK !
They don't exist for me and i'm only looking for games with physical media.

Yeah no thanks if the future is cloud-gaming. Digital games are one thing but if it comes to gaming on cloud, I will never care for that, either.
Speaking of cloud though, I still really want Splatoon 2 to support cloud saving and it still baffles me that Nintendo doesn't support this game for it. It really sucks because I spent so much time on this game and it's the one I would hate to lose my progress in the most.

Eh, it’s an option. I don’t get why everyone’s so negative about it when it will always be an option rather than the main method of delivering games. Let’s be honest, if a company can choose between offering a subscription for £20 a year or selling them individually for £35, which do you think they’ll offer? Both, of course! Origin already offers this and it makes the most economical sense for the companies involved.

If I can’t take my game up into the mountain, I don’t want that game.

I guess we'll have to wait and see. I fear that such a future might be dangerous to Nintendo, since they have trouble adapting to online, but they have proven us wrong many times before.

My internet connection isn't reliable and I can play the Switch from the loo, a train, or 10 miles above the ground in a plane without caring about power cuts or the internet. I don't see why Nintendo should worry about cloud gaming.

Maybe to compete with the cloud you have to make your own cloud services acceptable?

@Yosher It prevents save scumming when you go on a bad run in ranked games but honestly your multiplayer data should not be saved locally to begin with.

@Beermonkey Well in about 12 years the damage we have done to the world will be irreversible so that is the least of our worries.

@nessisonett Origin games also use always online drm.. as someone who plays garden warfare 2 on origin I know for a fact EA is not the best company when talking about morals

I will never be interested in cloud gaming. The only thing I am interested with cloud gaming is cloud saving as that is a massive benefit for everyone.

When games become cloud only, I quit.
Downloadable is just about bearable.

@Jokerwolf Yeah because it has nothing to do with the insane amount of cars on the road, or planes or cutting down trees in the rainforest

Ofc not, its us collectors with our tiny little plastic cartridges that are the cause!

As long as Nintendo provides an alternative to streaming games, I'll keep paying them money in exchange for their great games.

@Indielink I am aware, but this could be very easily circumvented by just making it so people are only able to restore Splatoon 2 save data once a week, or once a month. It's really not that hard of a solution.

@Jokerwolf Ah, it’s back to 12 years from 10 years? Phew! I was afraid it was 1979 again 😜

I’m not surprised by this answer. Sounds pretty sensible to me.

@Jokerwolf Grumble grumble global warming...

On second thought, if the cloud services stay bad, that means they won't be able to do cloud-only services.
Well, if they want people happy, that is.

Stadia hype reminds me of all the nonsense on how dedicated gaming devices were dead because APPLE was getting into gaming with the iPhone and AppleTV (and garbage like OuYA and Shield)... The new tech "flavor of the month"

And here we are with PS4 about to catch up with the Wii and Switch selling even as a handhelD 🙄

I can port-forward Dragon Quest to my Phone from Steam (and my entire AAA library). Still would tell people to just buy it on Switch and play it locally.

@Doktor-Mandrake Very true of course, that's why I pointed out that the cloud takeover would only be an option since the big companies would make more money selling us full-price games. Morals don't normally make these dudes money.

It’s an option. Not the only option.

@nessisonett I always thought that origin access was similair to other things like gamepass on xbox? I.e still download the game and play it direct off the hardware, but with a subscription based service.. where as goohle stadia is straight from their cloud

Huge pc gamer myself, i just wish there were more triple A on gog.com.. its why ill never understand console only gamers who are very keen to wave goodbye to physical releases..

I miss the days of buying a pc game, putting the disc in, installing it and using the provided cd key.. then steam happened

Sadly it looks like I might not be able to enjoy physical releases on console either one day already pass on some games like mk11 due to them expecting me to download part of the game

@Doktor-Mandrake My point was that Origin Access offers the option to both access the game through subscription or buy the game outright. I expect this practice to continue through streaming as it maximises sales. If companies realise that still offering a download would make them more money, they'll do that.

Because money talks, it will be the norm one day... this is tough to accept, and I'm not for it, but it's coming. Problem with the concept at its most basic understanding is, complete and total streaming will be locked behind a paywall that says you cannot play newly released, cutting edge videogames AT ALL unless you A) HAVE Internet (or reliable Internet), B) have a high enough speed "to" stream (again, reliably), and C) have a device that can fully process what it's trying to stream.

Now, I think the more pragmatic solution is either 3rd parties or "the big 3" will still offer optional "console boxes" so you can download instead of streaming (home version and a portable solution like Switch to take it with you) or download it to own favorite "box" of choice, given its up to par. Alternatively, the big 3 could offer to send you physical media with the game preloaded or blank physical media for you to download your game to if you so choose.

None of this is doom and gloom, we'll just have to see how it all shakes out.

@nessisonett True, and when you think of the kind of internet some parts of the world has, it'll be a VERY long time before it can be deemed as a replacement

Though it still stands, physical releases are dying out, already happened on PC and its slowly happening to console gaming too.. while still not the same as google stadia its still something that requires internet and servers to download the games from

@Beermonkey Doesn't mean the world is over, just means stuff is going to hit he fan.

I question why that power up was shown in one Mario game..

Like it or not that’s the way the industry is going. That’s why I don’t want anything to do with it. Retro gaming is the way to go. I’m building my collection even more now, 8 and 16 bit era:)

@nessisonett Because the threat is that this will become the ONLY option at some point in the future, so those of us who don't want to surrender control and ownership of our entertainment to massive corporations are resistant to the idea.

@Doktor-Mandrake
I'm in the same boat here. Anyway, there is so much stuff I still haven't played in my life, that my backlog would probably last me years and years and years of playing non-stop 24/7.

So I say, sure, get that cloud gaming on. I just won't buy into it. I'll track down copies of older games I haven't played instead and keep playing actual games. I'll be the one deciding what I can play., and I won't have my online behavior in games tracked to build a psychological profile aimed at better understanding my consumer nature to better sell me stuff.

Cloud gaming is not for me. And this is where I become an old fart yelling at clouds.

@MaaadMatt But at what point have the major players said this will become the only option? The only company saying that are Google, who're hardly known for their games.

@nessisonett for now. As it stands digital will probably dominate and become the only means of aquiring new games and that already leaves a lot of control to the publishers.

If it became 'the norm' for cloud gaming and with gamers not caring how they recieve their fun do you think big publishers wouldn't choose total control where they could in theory decide to take away the games so they can sell it again later in limited formats or something?

This is how stuff like dlc on disc and lootboxes are around. People complain sure but they still get their monet at the end of the day.

@nessisonett I'm not saying the corporations themselves have explicitly said it, but the cultural commentators in favour of it have, and it that certainly will be the ultimate aim of any company offering a cloud service. We will no longer own our games/films/music and these corporate behemoths can decide what we can access, when and how. That is their dream. I'm old-fashioned - I like to own the stuff I pay for - so I find that possible outcome a depressing one.

@MaaadMatt I'm genuinely convinced that there'll still be a vinyl equivalent around. I have Spotify for ease of access despite me 'not owning the music'. For music I enjoy, I buy it on vinyl. If anything, Spotify's probably increased vinyl sales as the number of people being exposed to certain music has increased.

@nessisonett I hope you're right. As a movie fan, even if it becomes a niche market, I want to be able to buy physical copies of films I love. The other day I noticed a bunch of films I'd kept in my watchlist at Netflix had vanished because Netflix lost the rights to stream them. Sad if that becomes the only option in the future.

@MaaadMatt Definitely. The golden days of movie streaming are over as it's becoming more and more partitioned. It's going to end up costing a fortune!

Stadia will only become a threat if people think playing Call of Duty and FIFA on a smartphone/low-end computer via Stadia is "good enough" and therefore no longer need to purchase of the next PlayStation, Xbox, and high-end PC GPUs/CPUs.

Until that happens, it's is irrelevant.

@nessisonett No they won't. They will only release them on the streaming service. It will happen.

@Dethmunk Until the speed of light goes up, for get about it. Input latency is a thing.

I can see Nintendo releasing a traditional console after Switch but in the next decade I wouldn't be surprised to see a cloud DS or Gameboy.

@StevenG ....You do realise that the speed of light is roughly 3 x 10 ^8 ms^-1? That has absolutely zero bearing on the latency as if all signals moved that quickly, our mind couldn't comprehend any lag. Ever. The problem is that the signals don't move that quickly or info's lost in the process.

@Dethmunk

Yup, it honestly seems silly to worry about streaming given the technological limitations of such a thing in certain areas. It is not universally feasible.

Cloud gaming will be a thing most people will try out (when it's possible), a few stick with, but many will get tired of the novelty and move on.

But there's A LOT of the world, even in developed countries, that don't have a strong infrastructure for this. Here in the US service is decent in the bigger cities, but quickly deteriorates as you get further away. I don't see streaming being a thing for many years.

The day consoles and physical games stop being made is the day I stop buying games, and focus entirely on every other system made previously, and play the huge backlog among all the Nintendo and Playstation systems. I'm not going to do cloud based gaming or digital gaming only.

@nessisonett Even at the speed of light, it takes light 1/14th of a second to make a trip to the other side of the planet. So if you want to play somebody on the other side of the Earth, even the theoretical best case still has noticeable latency. Of course playing somebody that far away is rare, but it shows there are practical limits that might never be overcome.

@CobraA1 Actually, as far as I’m aware, I’m order to avoid this, information isn’t sent directly to and from each user. Isn’t that why there’s a ‘middle point’ of a server? For example, players in the UK and Russia would both use the same Europe server?

@nessisonett At the speed of light Tokyo to NYC is 30ms each way. 60ms a human is going to notice. Heck on a twitch shooter you can notice way less.

Once cloud gaming takes hold of the neophytes I will scoff at their naiveté while I play at full speed. As I switch physical media in seconds I will snicker as node ninnies await the next packet.
As I leave the city and urban areas and retreat to one of tranquility and peace I will laugh with such righteous indignation that even the furry inhabitants will react with marvel while I continue to play inhibited only by the fullness of my battery.

@nessisonett
The speed of light is essentially useless with current data usage. The inertia required and energy renders the signal to a zero state so latency is not even a thought at this point. Once we get a better understanding of Quantum states and positions then Light might be useful but less helpful since QP creates an instant connection.

@Realnoize agreed and Ill be doing the exact same thing, plenty of fantastic games released over the decades that ill just discover old goodies I either passed over or never had the time to play!