Nintendo had a good run, but aside from a few exclusive titles I'm done. Can't keep supporting a company that is hostile towards its users. I'd rather invest in a Steam Deck from here on out.
Nokia is alive and kicking. They've dropped out of the highly visible mobile phone game (Nokia has no stake in HMD Global, the company that now owns the trademark), but Nokia Networks is still the top supplier of mobile networks gear in the free world (sorry, Huawei).
They truly did. I was a lifelong Nintendo enthusiast until the stuff with the 3DS started.
They kept getting more and more user hostile, and sometimes quite literally!
I own a switch and like the system, but still think PS Vita was far superior.
Broken joycons, forcing new purchases of pairs only, so many failed I myself am part of the class action lawsuit against them over it.
Suing and sending 'investigators' after enulation developers.
Stealing fan-patches and translations and selling them on their store.
Reselling games some of us have purchased numerous times, only to find the 'remakes' are just shitty emulated ports. And again they would download fan-fixed roms and use those.
After D2 I am done. They didn't bother to give any way to use M/KB, the multiplayer is virtually non-existent, as is chat (typed, voice is non-existent). No mouse or use of stick-controled aiming such as in twin stick shooters breaks sorceress teleport, Enigma teleport, etc.
I paid $60, which was bad enough for a shitty re-skin of a decades old game that could run on a graphing calculator, but I chose the wrong system to purchase it on.
Nintendo is the definition of user hostile now, to the point of losing lifelong customers.
They and Disney are in the same boat. They had the balls to think their shitty entertainment businesses had been around so long they were too big to fail and didn't need their customers.
Well, maybe they don't need us, but they sure as shit need our money.
Nintendo has been offering free repair/replacement of Joy-Cons for quite some time now, and AFAIK they have been sold separately since launch. What are you on about?
It's a bit unhelpful to mix in things that third parties (developers/publishers) have done with Nintendo's own behaviour here - the fan patch/translation thing was Square Enix, wasn't it? The quality of the Diablo 2 release is on Activision/Blizzard, not really Nintendo.
I agree on the hardware quality side - the joycons and the pro controller d-pad have been big issues for the Switch.
Now that encryptluks is out, yeah, I think we can all agree Nintendo is over. Well done, Nintendo. Nearly got there with the switch, but, sadly you missed the critical encryptluks market. And missing that market is critical to long term success.
Would love Nintendo to bring back some personnality to their next system. Switch was such a downgrade from 3DS regarding experience. Android didn't help in terms of design or speed but I missed all the funny features and crazyness Nintendo got us used to with their previous handheld. Also, the eshop was such a pain in the ass to browse, again it screamed Android System all the way for both poor selection and unbearable slowness.
Yeah I also never understood why the eShop is so bad. Even scrolling around in videos takes forever.
But then again, me and my friends always buy cartridges so that we can trade finished games. So maybe someone at Nintendo did the math and decided that a global CDN isn't worth it.
Because it runs in a browser (WebKit-based), and because the browser is compiled without JIT for security concerns.
It should really be a native applet, but Nintendo probably wanted to control it without needing a full firmware update.
I'm not sure there's much to be simplified, interpreted JS is just that slow. In more recent firmwares Nintendo introduced more security-oriented changes (CFI, PAC) that potentially slowed the browser down even further. The Switch CPU is also not fast to begin with, and severely underclocked compared to what you would see on a regular Tegra X1.
It used to be that you could access the Switch eshop using a dumped console certificate, and it was very smooth on a regular desktop browser.
In my opinion Switch has good balance of personality and usefulness. You can play it at home, you can play it handheld, you can share a joycon with a friend, it got games like ARMS and LABO kits, all that seems like a lot of character to me.
Actually he only said that it has historically been rare to see a company move from a highly successful system to the next highly successful system.
So the "significant challenge" is to not end up like the PS2 to PS3 transition, or Xbox 1 to 360... Both of which still were very successful, just not quite as dominating as PS1 to PS2, for example.
Also, the Switch dev forums are chock full with Indie teams who need a bit of funding and a bit of support and don't want to deal with PC and piracy anymore. So I'd predict we will have amazing new Switch indie games for years to come.
In my opinion, the biggest issue for a Switch successor might be that for most great indie games, the console is already powerful enough. So there isn't any obvious hardware upgrade apart from the screen, which they already did. It's kind of the same reason why we don't upgrade our phones every 2 years anymore.
There are very few Switch exclusive indie games that are good. I can't recall any, in fact. The Switch does have a lot of shovelware, but that's probably not the category of videogames you were focusing on.
I hadn't heard of Redout or Super Chariot but both look exciting.
I've also been browsing the shop going a year or two back but the store UI doesn't do much for assessing quality, which is a bit of a shame. I don't think it sets up the market well for smaller games.
Because some people like to have the option to play portably. I went from getting games in Humble Bundle and at steep discounts on "steam key resellers" to paying Switch eShop sale prices or sometimes full prices. Some people will go from piracy to Switch eShop.
This isn't really germane to my question, which was asking why the fact that they are "tired of piracy" is at all relevant if they're publishing on such a "bad" platform anyway.
If you spend marketing money on the PC version and then it gets pirated a lot, that's a bad roi for the game developer. Also, supporting PC well is expensive because the hardware varies so much. As a result, Steam reviews suffer.
If Nintendo spends money to promote your game because they know piracy isn't an issue on their platform, that's always a huge win for the developer. And support is much easier because everyone has the same standardized hardware. So the developer even gets a better profit margin out of each sale.
That's the gist of why many games start out as a time limited console-only release and then later expand to PC when the engine matures.
>In my opinion, the biggest issue for a Switch successor might be that for most great indie games, the console is already powerful enough.
This is much less of a problem for Nintendo, their hardware is always significantly behind that of MS and Sony so they have plenty of technical headroom to grow into.
This is basically the reason why I grabbed a Steam Deck. The upside with having a Steam library is that so far, Steam is the longest-lived downloadable/online game platform there is. I'd rather have a portable Steam library and own all of my titles there than try to hedge my bets with the Switch. The Switch's hardware is absolutely lovely, but I can't help but feel like buying a lot of games on it is a bad idea at this point.
Nintendo are in a sticky situation. They are a poor value proposition these days. My kids quickly lost interest in their Switches when they saw Mario Kart prices and to play each other they would have to buy three copies. At best they get used for Animal Crossing that came with it and any free stuff and that's about it.
What they tend to gravitate towards is their iPads where they can play < $10 games together which are available across family sharing (Minecraft, Among Us, Roblox are popular). They connect xbox controllers to the things and use that. The iPads are also fully blown computers so they are used for just about everything else in their lives.
I don't think Nintendo have a chance against that.
I'm considering a switch (for the kids), selling it to myself as "the games are expensive but not optimized for addictiveness, it's a better business model"... But is that true?
We are already having fun with Minecraft (java), but I see my son sometime pulled into long stretches of of "free" motorcross games (or worse, he lets some car drive some track to get coins) on some shabby website.
Animal Crossing is terribly addictive so I certainly wouldn't sell it to yourself on that basis. What I've found is when they start exploring "free" things, it's time to put the thing away. They are bored and don't know it and that's your time to start parenting rather than letting the machine do it for you.
I tend to encourage my kids to do something in the real world when this happens. They still paint, draw and read and it's a welcome diversion after a few minutes away.
I don't disagree with that. The problem is evolving it into a market saturated with general purpose devices and subscription services. That's something that Sony and Nintendo shrugged off.
Lets throw this on the table: I actually played Fortnite on my iPad the other day via XBox Live streaming. It was perfectly playable, with an XBox controller streaming to my TV. And I didn't have to buy a Switch, PS4 or any up front cost on games at all.
Even the cheapest iPad is more expensive than a Switch. And the setup is complicated and finicky. You need some way to stream to your TV or connect to your TV, you need a controller, iPads aren’t exactly optimized for gaming or easy to set up for gaming (relative to a Switch where everything just works). All those little things add a little friction but in the end that ends up adding up to a lot of friction.
Also, unlike phones iPads are not general purpose devices that everyone has just around and if they have them, they may be tied up with other duties.
Also, game quality is abysmal (if a lot less pricy). It’s just not a good fit.
That might change, it might change slowly, I don’t know – but currently I don’t see general purpose devices as much of a threat for consoles. Reason for change? Reason for putting focus on things general purpose devices don’t do well? Sure. But no existential threat.
Nintendo games are of very good quality. They have a ton of IP, the attach rates of their games are unmatched in the other consoles as well. If they keep doing what they are doing they’ll be fine.
That's one opinion. I love to use my projector from the couch with split screen games. It's a very different experience than everyone looking at their own device. I like it now and I liked it then.
In my opinion the mistake was buying Switch Lites in the first place. I would only see that being a better choice if you're a consultant who's never in the same place for long. Your kids may or may not agree with you on the split screen, too. I enjoyed it in the 90s and it's still my preferred way of gaming with friends over online or LAN play.
Really? They've sold >107 million units of the Switch/Switch lite/Switch OLED so far.
That makes the Switch one of the best selling consoles ever made - it beats the Wii, the original PlayStation, the PS3, the GBA. It's edging towards the PS4 and the GB & GBC.
According to their own stats, each of those consoles has an average of ~8 games sold (excluding download only titles, so the real value is higher).
Even though it might not work for you or your family, I think that's good evidence that Nintendo have a formula that works pretty well for them - those kinds of sales figures are not indicative of a company in crisis to me.
Certainly not saying it's not successful for its time. But this is about the future and the whole dedicated device model and expensive games are rapidly becoming a dead end. The tablet and phone gaming market has a lot of overlap now and people expect there to be market parity with that.
On top of that there are a lot more Android and iOS devices out there than there are Switches.
I suspect Nintendo will inevitably end up like Sega and be a games publisher on other platforms. And there's nothing wrong with that. People like Nintendo because of the software. The only reason the hardware sells is because it's the only way to get the software.
I don't agree with you on these points - my experience of console/PC gaming vs phone/tablet gaming is that phone/tablet gaming experiences tend to be very shallow drop in/out experiences compared to what is available on console or PC. Even the heavily curated Apple Arcade doesn't have any good examples of this that I've seen.
I've not seen a Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, or even Mario Kart 8 tier experience on mobile. Given that, I don't see Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft abandoning their dedicated hardware any time soon. Sales are still strong, and there's no evidence of consumers abandoning these consoles for mobile-led gaming as yet. Maybe it'll happen, but I'm skeptical. Playing big gaming experiences on a phone display with phone controls (or worse, some kind of bolted-on-extra controls) sounds like a miserable experience to me.
You mention games like fortnite a bit in other comments, and the court documents from Epic's case show the revenue share for fortnite is not in favour of iOS or Android - it's PS4 by some margin - https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/apple...
edit: for Sega, given you raised that example - Sega had a series of missteps in the console hardware market that Nintendo don't have any real analogue for - the Mega CD, the 32X, the Saturn (outside Japan) - all of those led to losing consumer confidence. And then, the Dreamcast failed against the behemoth that was the PS2.
The closest I can come to this for Nintendo is the Wii U, which was also a pretty significant flop, but the Switch has had them bounce back in a really strong fashion.
>my experience of console/PC gaming vs phone/tablet gaming is that phone/tablet gaming experiences tend to be very shallow drop in/out experiences compared to what is available on console or PC.
Yeah, I think that's exactly what separates phone games and console/PC market, and it'll stay that way. Short form contact is exactly what the on-the-go audience is looking for. Smartphones in general have killed the dedicated gaming handheld market. You can see that in the final generation of dedicated handheld consoles (3DS/Vita) which sold less combined than either the Nintendo DS or the Game Boy. But not because the smartphones had better games, but just entertainment with social media, or streaming video. Vine or TikTok are built around the short video format too.
There's plenty of good ports like XCOM 2, Alien: Isolation, Divinity: Original Sin 2. But you can hardly convince someone who has the option of getting a game on PC or console to spend that same money on the same game on a phone. Meanwhile console manufacturers have exclusive games to convince people to buy their console, to join the audience of people who will say "why would I buy this game on phone when it runs better and has better controls on this?"
Meanwhile Apple and Google don't do the same investments in exclusives because very few people are picking their phones based on the games on it, because that's not the phone's primary purpose.
> Yeah, I think that's exactly what separates phone games and console/PC market, and it'll stay that way. Short form contact is exactly what the on-the-go audience is looking for. Smartphones in general have killed the dedicated gaming handheld market. You can see that in the final generation of dedicated handheld consoles (3DS/Vita) which sold less combined than either the Nintendo DS or the Game Boy. But not because the smartphones had better games, but just entertainment with social media, or streaming video. Vine or TikTok are built around the short video format too.
I think that's fair - with a second contributing factor that the 3DS and Vita were more expensive compared to their predecessors - the DS was $150 at launch. The 3DS was $249.99 at launch, with a subsequent drop to $170 a few months later because the sales were dire.
And the Vita at least in the UK suffered from literally no marketing - the 3DS had adverts on TV. People knew about it, even if they didn't have one. The Vita was anonymous in the marketplace - you only knew about it if you were really looking for it.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadSuch a funny way to describe a 130+ year old company.
They kept getting more and more user hostile, and sometimes quite literally!
I own a switch and like the system, but still think PS Vita was far superior.
Broken joycons, forcing new purchases of pairs only, so many failed I myself am part of the class action lawsuit against them over it.
Suing and sending 'investigators' after enulation developers.
Stealing fan-patches and translations and selling them on their store.
Reselling games some of us have purchased numerous times, only to find the 'remakes' are just shitty emulated ports. And again they would download fan-fixed roms and use those.
After D2 I am done. They didn't bother to give any way to use M/KB, the multiplayer is virtually non-existent, as is chat (typed, voice is non-existent). No mouse or use of stick-controled aiming such as in twin stick shooters breaks sorceress teleport, Enigma teleport, etc.
I paid $60, which was bad enough for a shitty re-skin of a decades old game that could run on a graphing calculator, but I chose the wrong system to purchase it on.
Nintendo is the definition of user hostile now, to the point of losing lifelong customers.
They and Disney are in the same boat. They had the balls to think their shitty entertainment businesses had been around so long they were too big to fail and didn't need their customers.
Well, maybe they don't need us, but they sure as shit need our money.
Talk about next-level hand-waving.
I agree on the hardware quality side - the joycons and the pro controller d-pad have been big issues for the Switch.
RIP.
It runs on a modified version of the 3DS software (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch_system_softwar...).
But then again, me and my friends always buy cartridges so that we can trade finished games. So maybe someone at Nintendo did the math and decided that a global CDN isn't worth it.
In my opinion Switch has good balance of personality and usefulness. You can play it at home, you can play it handheld, you can share a joycon with a friend, it got games like ARMS and LABO kits, all that seems like a lot of character to me.
So the "significant challenge" is to not end up like the PS2 to PS3 transition, or Xbox 1 to 360... Both of which still were very successful, just not quite as dominating as PS1 to PS2, for example.
Also, the Switch dev forums are chock full with Indie teams who need a bit of funding and a bit of support and don't want to deal with PC and piracy anymore. So I'd predict we will have amazing new Switch indie games for years to come.
In my opinion, the biggest issue for a Switch successor might be that for most great indie games, the console is already powerful enough. So there isn't any obvious hardware upgrade apart from the screen, which they already did. It's kind of the same reason why we don't upgrade our phones every 2 years anymore.
I've also been browsing the shop going a year or two back but the store UI doesn't do much for assessing quality, which is a bit of a shame. I don't think it sets up the market well for smaller games.
Why is this relevant if they're still on PC anyway?
If Nintendo spends money to promote your game because they know piracy isn't an issue on their platform, that's always a huge win for the developer. And support is much easier because everyone has the same standardized hardware. So the developer even gets a better profit margin out of each sale.
That's the gist of why many games start out as a time limited console-only release and then later expand to PC when the engine matures.
This is much less of a problem for Nintendo, their hardware is always significantly behind that of MS and Sony so they have plenty of technical headroom to grow into.
The switch is a fantastic device. It's only failure is that it's getting just a little long in the tooth.
What they tend to gravitate towards is their iPads where they can play < $10 games together which are available across family sharing (Minecraft, Among Us, Roblox are popular). They connect xbox controllers to the things and use that. The iPads are also fully blown computers so they are used for just about everything else in their lives.
I don't think Nintendo have a chance against that.
We are already having fun with Minecraft (java), but I see my son sometime pulled into long stretches of of "free" motorcross games (or worse, he lets some car drive some track to get coins) on some shabby website.
I tend to encourage my kids to do something in the real world when this happens. They still paint, draw and read and it's a welcome diversion after a few minutes away.
Wow that's good advice I'm going to apply on myself! Thanks
http://xmoto.tuxfamily.org/
Lets throw this on the table: I actually played Fortnite on my iPad the other day via XBox Live streaming. It was perfectly playable, with an XBox controller streaming to my TV. And I didn't have to buy a Switch, PS4 or any up front cost on games at all.
Also, unlike phones iPads are not general purpose devices that everyone has just around and if they have them, they may be tied up with other duties.
Also, game quality is abysmal (if a lot less pricy). It’s just not a good fit.
That might change, it might change slowly, I don’t know – but currently I don’t see general purpose devices as much of a threat for consoles. Reason for change? Reason for putting focus on things general purpose devices don’t do well? Sure. But no existential threat.
Nintendo games are of very good quality. They have a ton of IP, the attach rates of their games are unmatched in the other consoles as well. If they keep doing what they are doing they’ll be fine.
Also Homeworld Mobile.
They could play on one console attached to a TV?
But yes for all three to play at the same time on separate consoles would get pricey.
And couch co-op is my favourite way to play games, still.
Switch Lite has a 5.5 inch screen, definitely not a fun way to do split screen.
The post I replied to seemed to say that split screen in general was not great. I'm just contending that's a matter of taste!
That makes the Switch one of the best selling consoles ever made - it beats the Wii, the original PlayStation, the PS3, the GBA. It's edging towards the PS4 and the GB & GBC.
According to their own stats, each of those consoles has an average of ~8 games sold (excluding download only titles, so the real value is higher).
Even though it might not work for you or your family, I think that's good evidence that Nintendo have a formula that works pretty well for them - those kinds of sales figures are not indicative of a company in crisis to me.
On top of that there are a lot more Android and iOS devices out there than there are Switches.
I suspect Nintendo will inevitably end up like Sega and be a games publisher on other platforms. And there's nothing wrong with that. People like Nintendo because of the software. The only reason the hardware sells is because it's the only way to get the software.
I've not seen a Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, or even Mario Kart 8 tier experience on mobile. Given that, I don't see Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft abandoning their dedicated hardware any time soon. Sales are still strong, and there's no evidence of consumers abandoning these consoles for mobile-led gaming as yet. Maybe it'll happen, but I'm skeptical. Playing big gaming experiences on a phone display with phone controls (or worse, some kind of bolted-on-extra controls) sounds like a miserable experience to me.
You mention games like fortnite a bit in other comments, and the court documents from Epic's case show the revenue share for fortnite is not in favour of iOS or Android - it's PS4 by some margin - https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/apple...
edit: for Sega, given you raised that example - Sega had a series of missteps in the console hardware market that Nintendo don't have any real analogue for - the Mega CD, the 32X, the Saturn (outside Japan) - all of those led to losing consumer confidence. And then, the Dreamcast failed against the behemoth that was the PS2.
The closest I can come to this for Nintendo is the Wii U, which was also a pretty significant flop, but the Switch has had them bounce back in a really strong fashion.
Yeah, I think that's exactly what separates phone games and console/PC market, and it'll stay that way. Short form contact is exactly what the on-the-go audience is looking for. Smartphones in general have killed the dedicated gaming handheld market. You can see that in the final generation of dedicated handheld consoles (3DS/Vita) which sold less combined than either the Nintendo DS or the Game Boy. But not because the smartphones had better games, but just entertainment with social media, or streaming video. Vine or TikTok are built around the short video format too.
There's plenty of good ports like XCOM 2, Alien: Isolation, Divinity: Original Sin 2. But you can hardly convince someone who has the option of getting a game on PC or console to spend that same money on the same game on a phone. Meanwhile console manufacturers have exclusive games to convince people to buy their console, to join the audience of people who will say "why would I buy this game on phone when it runs better and has better controls on this?"
Meanwhile Apple and Google don't do the same investments in exclusives because very few people are picking their phones based on the games on it, because that's not the phone's primary purpose.
I think that's fair - with a second contributing factor that the 3DS and Vita were more expensive compared to their predecessors - the DS was $150 at launch. The 3DS was $249.99 at launch, with a subsequent drop to $170 a few months later because the sales were dire.
And the Vita at least in the UK suffered from literally no marketing - the 3DS had adverts on TV. People knew about it, even if they didn't have one. The Vita was anonymous in the marketplace - you only knew about it if you were really looking for it.
(And I wouldn't mind trying Card of Darkness, Grindstone, or Sneaky Sasquatch either...)
The hardware definitely makes a huge difference:
1. Mario Kart 8, Super Smash Bros., Splatoon, etc. are very similar to their Wii U counterparts, but the Wii U was a failure.
2. Hybrid gaming existed before the Switch (Super Game Boy, PSP 2000, PSVita/TV, iPhone/iPad...) but Nintendo executed it perfectly.
If you like Mario Kart, it's a fantastic game that you can play for years. It's also accessible enough that basically everyone can play it.
> My kids quickly lost interest in their Switches when they saw Mario Kart prices and to play each other they would have to buy three copies.
That's a big advantage of the regular Switch vs. Switch Lite: 4-way local multiplayer in docked mode.