MSaturn

I’d love to see them regain their footing, but I kind of doubt it’s possible. I think they are sort of trapped now. Budgets are too big to do anything interesting. Hope I’m wrong!

I mean, people hate on this company, whatever. But if even they are not able to stick to physical cartridges when that is their whole brand identity, then it’s over y’all. I thought Nintendo would hold out a little longer than this but as far as I’m concerned the all digital future is essentially here.

I want it. Pretty good series. Very charming.

Oh no I’m too young to have a second childhood!

It’s been -

One year since you looked at me, cocked your head to the side and said it’s coming,

Several months since you said to me “I promise I’ll tell you sometime this fiscal year”

February, you’re teasing me, “come back in two months find out the rest then”

April, you showed it off to me, but it’ll still a month before I get to play it…

@pikachupikachup to me that’s what the game key cards are for. They go on retail shelves, catch the eye, maybe parents or grandparents buy them or consumers are reminded about a game they forgot about. Plus retailers have a high margin item to sell, which makes the console more valuable to them in some ways… game key cards allow Nintendo to keep all these benefits of having a physical product without having to spend money manufacturing a real physical game…

Good! Hopefully people listen.

If not, I think the Switch 2 might be last console for me. I don’t know, it’s obviously impossible to say really but I’m pretty reluctant to spend what consoles cost on a bunch of digital games…

I liked these games as a kid. I liked going down the water slides. Yeah they aren’t good… but are they really that bad?

Games with cutting edge graphics, 4k resolution, high frame rates, etc.

Games with lengthy campaigns that last dozens or hundreds of hours; games in short that cannot be beaten in a weekend.

Games that are essentially finished at launch - that are not trying constantly to sell you DLC or micro transactions. Games that are conceived of as discreet artistic statements, not never ending services that go on forever and monetize you forever…

Games that cost the same $50-$60 dollars they always have.

We will only be able to have two of these things. My worry is that if we aren’t careful we’ll get none of them. After the sticker shock wore off I realized I would rather have games cost more if it means we can evade the worst of the live service nonsense.

I do not expect this game on switch 2. With how long they spent, this better be the most incredible game ever produced. This is like relaunching the franchise after such a long pause, and I don’t even want to think about how much they spent. This game is going to have to astonish people and if it can do that it probably can’t run on Switch 2.

On the other hand they will want to hit as Many platforms as possible so maybe there could be a cloud gaming version? I suppose that’s possible.

There is no benefit to me at all in buying these. Maybe someday I’ll see one on super sale or something but in normal course of things I would never buy one.

There’s no perfect “one size fits all” solution. They need more customization options I think.

This is kind of shocking to me. Isn’t their slogan “Forever Physical”? This is the same company that delayed the physical copy of the Panzer Dragoon remake for months so that the big patch could be included on the cart, something I really appreciated since otherwise the physical copy would have been pointless…

If even companies like Limited Run are messing around with this game key card nonsense it really makes me wonder what’s going on. Nintendo must be incentivizing publishers to use them somehow. Obviously they’re cheaper but I wonder if there are other incentives behind the scenes that we don’t know about?

I actually kind of respect that the lottery was real and not even Nintendo employees got special treatment.

Great news! I’m assuming also that companies like limited run will still full cartridge releases. So, ironically, on this console, it might be the indie games that I buy physically and the AAA third party stuff that I download, haha.

@Gorlock eh, everyone’s different I guess but I already went through something like this with the PS4 and the space required for the mandatory installs and it definitely impacted how much I used the system and ultimately how many games I even wanted to buy.

And this is why key cards stink. I have a 1.5 terabyte sd card in my current switch. It’s about half full, plenty of space left. I transfer that, I get a few third parties… I’m going to need a big sd card for switch 2 in no time. They literally don’t make big enough sd cards for all the third party games I buy… or would have bought as the case may be. People say it’s annoying having to swap out the cartridges, but I think it’s much more annoying having to choose games to delete or redownload them later if you want to play it again after a while. You want to spend 30 minutes deciding what to delete and then wait an hour for a 70gb game to download and install? I mean I don’t usually play for more than about an hour at a time anyway. The games I buy will be played once and discarded if I can’t store them on local memory…

Whelp, the all digital future is imminent. We’ve known it’s been coming for a long time… I get that the game key cards are beneficial for certain situations, but really for most people you may as well just download the game so you don’t have to keep swapping the cards out.

@HeadPirate oh nice! Thanks for the info.

Honestly looked great. Now, I’m very interested, but there’s one thing I’m bummed by. They said they totally redid movement and changed how leveling works etc. I assume this means they brought it more in line with Skyrim, which dispenses with the movement based skills like athleticism and acrobatics. But one of my favorite memories in Oblivion was acquiring/enchanting a full set of equipment that fortified acrobatics, and the his maxed out stat I just ran through the world vaulting over buildings like a super hero. It was weird and cool, and yeah kind of broken and janky but it felt appropriate for a fantasy world. I think it was a mistake to remove that sort of stuff from Skyrim, and it will be a mistake to remove it from Oblivion, if that is what they have done.

Hope it comes to Nintendo one way or another. It’s a good game.

Revealed at the September Direct, launches late November/early December, costs half your paycheck because it can.

This game looks fantastic. I haven’t been this excited for a new Mario kart in ages!

Aaah! I want! Why won’t you sell it to me GungHo!?!?

Love the graphics. Definitely one to keep an eye on.

@Mgalens that would be spectacular to see, especially if they took the opportunity to go back and finish the game properly… Yeah, man if they did that this game would be an all time classic.

I love these games, especially Silver Star Story. Eternal Blue is both better and worse although in the end it’s still got a lot of charm. But Silver Star… it’s just so charming. I even like all the things people don’t like, like the silly jokes and stuff. Glad that more people will get to experience them.

@Serpenterror is that true? I thought it was the PS1 versions that were more well known due the small Sega CD install base. Regardless I agree with you that including both versions would have been ideal.

I think this game looks beautiful and also freshens up the Mario Kart formula in a way I did not anticipate at all. They’ve done a great job with this I can already tell.

I have seen on many articles comments where people are saying that adjusting for inflation is wrong because of wages or various products that don’t change price as much, etc. I think this is a mistake. If you wages do not rise with inflation this simply means that inflation adjusted wages are FALLING. Anyway, actually wages do rise wit inflation, just not instantaneously. Adjusting for inflation remains the best way to compare prices across time.

@ElkinFencer10 good point, and it is possible to get something like a Best Buy credit card or something so maybe that’s what I ought to do!

I know it’s a good value. I hope it’s powerful enough to see healthy third party support for years to come! The problem with discretionary purchases like this though is cash flow. Maybe they need to start offering payment plans like they do with phones…

I have many problems with an all digital future. These game key card releases are the worst combination for me… but I guess for some they might have some value since they can be resold.
At this point it seems like Nintendo is about a generation behind Sony, where with Sony my game purchases dropped way off with the PS4 because it was not practical to buy everything physically, since you still had to install it forcing me to spend an extra chunk of money on a big external hard drive. Now with the switch 2, it seems like the situation will repeat, with a massive SD card being necessary to deal with all the 60gb 3rd party games you have to download… it’s another wrinkle in the economics of gaming that just starts to make things too expensive to bother with.

It really is pretty spectacular when you lay it out that way. I can’t wait to get one… eventually!

I think this sounds pretty cool actually. I’ll be getting this eventually I think.

@MocawNow I believe it was at one point during the height of the Wii. It surpassed Toyota if I recall. That’s probably what this person is remembering.

I think Bowser’s comments are quite different than Don Mattrick’s. At this point this price controversy is becoming absurd. Quite a few consoles have launched at or above $450, even in recent years. Inflation adjusted most consoles have cost more. The price is a little disappointing it’s not a scandal or something. Come on people!

Edit: Anyway, those Adam Orth tweets were much more dismissive and were a bigger controversy if I recall.

@Kingchin relax, I didn’t vote for him. I’m just saying that it will be a PR nightmare if they have to raise the price, so I expect them to look for ways to not have to do that. They may conclude that they have no choice though, like you are saying.

It will outsell the steam deck by a lot. And it will be similar enough that most people who buy a switch 2 won’t also buy a steam deck. On the other hand, steam deck users are not going to be compelled to switch either… for one thing the steam deck will have a much bigger library. I don’t know, I think I agree with the people saying they mostly serve different audiences but I guess there’s an outside chance that the steamdeck could become less viable in a market that includes the Switch 2.

I think there is still so much up in the air that it’s hard to predict how Nintendo will respond to this… certainly they will not want to raise the price having already announced it. But they might if they have no choice… more likely though I think is that other things will have their prices adjusted to try and offset the now underpriced console. One obvious thing is the online subscription. They could up that a bit and it’s just pure profit. Games, at least in so far as they haven’t had prices announced could be shifted to the $70 or I guess $80 price point. Another option would be to push digital game sales by not offering physical versions at all. There’s higher profit margins on that. They will also want to see what the competition does… they want to position their prices in a way that is aligned with the industry.

So that explains why so many 3rd party games are really just game key cards I guess? Lots of games are bigger than 64gb now, especially big open world games like elden ring.

Yeah it’s how everything adds up and then the fact that many 3rd party games will basically be download only in one sense or another means I will definitely need to buy another large SD card before long. It’s just a lot at one, more than what it usually costs to get started on a Nintendo console.

Naturally the boxes are different and they should be. I did appreciate however how clean all the switch games looked on my shelf, all matching and stuff.

Hopefully this means there will be good third party interest for at least a few years. I’m glad it turned out to be a pretty significant upgrade since I assume this console will be around for 8 years or so…

@IronMan30 I was also expecting/hoping for this and I’m glad it paid off. This is a game I was very very interested in and apparently they’ve done a great job fixing it up post release.

Somewhere, there is a nudist colony that is very disappointed right now.

Wait, how big are your pockets!?!?

Jokes aside, I’m very excited for this.

@MrGawain this I think is the most interesting point. People complained incessantly about the Switch being “behind” the other consoles, couldn’t get third party ports, etc. Now everyone complains about the price. They wanted all the enhancements without any cost. 2+2 cannot equal 5. I think Nintendo is succumbing to the law of gravity here. Eventually they had to upgrade to 4k and there are enormous costs in terms of man hours associated with that. I’d rather they just raise the price than try to micro transaction the game to death. It looks like that’s the path they are taking.

Look the price is unfortunate but it’s not exactly outrageous or anything. The console is $50 more than I was hoping for, and I figured that many first party games would be $70 like Tears of the Kingdom, so Mario Kart is about $10 more than I expected. It adds up though, and multiplied across everything, new pro controller, new micro sd card, etc it becomes more than I personally can afford at launch.

Not cheap enough…