this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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It’s official: No Nintendo console has lasted as long as Switch without being replaced | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com)
submitted 4 months ago by picandocodigo@lemmy.world to c/nintendo@lemmy.world
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[–] _NetNomad@kbin.run 121 points 4 months ago (4 children)

i know conventional gamer wisdom says otherwise but i think this just goes to show how more horsepower just leads to diminishing returns at this point. people call the switch underpowered but it's best selling game is a wii u port! gone are the days of each generation looking infinitely better than the last

[–] Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 41 points 4 months ago

Design > Specs

[–] greenskye@lemm.ee 37 points 4 months ago (6 children)

Eh, I think this is more indicative of the power of Nintendo IPs. My wife has been playing a lot of Pokemon Scarlett lately and it visibly struggles and has crashed or frozen at least a couple of times. This isn't the only switch game to do this either (none of them ports too).

People are just willing to put up with a lot of jank in order to play Nintendo games. If Nintendo didn't have such strong titles and only released those titles on Nintendo hardware, the switch hardware probably would've failed. The winning move was to heavily invest in strong games and then lock those games into their walled garden.

[–] vxx@lemmy.world 8 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Nintendo got ripped apart for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet.

[–] zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

They still sold like hotcakes though

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[–] Donut@leminal.space 6 points 4 months ago (4 children)

  1. Pokémon games aren't developed by Nintendo.

  2. Bad performance isn't always caused by lack of resources. It's more often bad optimisation / resource management.

[–] IndustryStandard@lemmy.world 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Even Zelda is stuttering. Or Mario Kart 8 when you play with multiple people.

Not everything can be saved by optimization. Even if it could, throwing more horsepower at the game is cheaper than having every game-developer write assembly code. Switch hardware is tragically slow and it shows in 3d games even with optimization.

[–] Donut@leminal.space 4 points 4 months ago

Optimisation has its limits, yes. The difference is that Nintendo is satisfied with targeting 30fps for a lot of games, and not caring as much about framedrops as long as the core gameplay is solid and works relatively bug-free.

They spent 12 months optimising Tears of the Kingdom, and it still has areas where there are slowdowns. It was not unfixable, they just decided it was good enough.

Its hard to compare games directly as each has their own constraints and dependencies. BotW for example was also released on Wii U, and that was a limiting factor. I don't remember stuttering in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, but they did make it run at 30fps when playing with 3-4 players, if you mean that?

I think a more egregious example would be Hyrule Warriors in co-op, but again this is Koei Tecmo and not in-housed developed so they didn't have access to the same resources and tricks that Nintendo has.

They could have spent 12 months getting those 10-20fps moments smoothened out, but it was probably not worth the investment as 99% of players don't care or don't even notice when a game slows down a bit.

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[–] GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world 18 points 4 months ago (1 children)

This was already established with the PSP vs 3DS.

[–] yggstyle@lemmy.world 23 points 4 months ago (1 children)

This was already established with the gameboy vs... everything else.

Ancient hardware. Complete market dominance.

[–] VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 10 points 4 months ago

Turns out battery life is incredibly important in the handeld market.

[–] entropicshart@sh.itjust.works 18 points 4 months ago (2 children)

The switch does struggle running higher resolution graphics; I can emulate BotW/TotK to look much better on PC simply due to having access to a stronger GPU.

4k gaming on PCs is still hard to accomplish without a high end machine, so I still think we will be seeing improvements with generations; at least until 4k gaming can be done on mid level hardware.

[–] lone_faerie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 33 points 4 months ago (4 children)

But you don't need 4k resolution to have a great game. That's what OP is getting at. When making a game for beefier hardware, you can use the better graphics as a crutch instead of focusing on better gameplay and story.

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 11 points 4 months ago

Thats why SNES rpgs stories were so great. And the rpgs today are just long winded slogs.

Data limits forced writers to cut the fat out of their scripts for the games, and get to the point.

I don't need 35 hours to say "thats the bad guy".

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[–] _NetNomad@kbin.run 5 points 4 months ago

i see comparisons of switch games on hardware and in emulators all the time and can never tell the difference, and same for all these recent 4k remasters. i am glad that there are options for people who can tell and do care but it's nowhere near as noticable to your average joe compared to the jump from snes to n64 or n64 to gamecube. or perhaps i am just a spectacularly below average joe haha

[–] PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 55 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I mean if the WiiU taught Nintendo anything it was probably not to rush the next big upgrade until you're positive it'll actually be a worthy following act.

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 14 points 4 months ago

They should have learned that from Virtual Boy. I STILL say virtual boy could have been really really cool.......if it were in more than just red. Which was the plan, but it got rushed to come out in 1995 at the cost of development time. All so people wouldn't feel conflicted in 1996 over which to buy. The N64, or the Virtual Boy.

Don't worry Nintendo. Nobody was conflicted about that....good job!

[–] MissJinx@lemmy.world 9 points 4 months ago

Also Switch doesn't need an upgrade. It's not competing with PS or XBox, they have a younger target audience and that means you don't meed 5000 horse powers of PS. Ot's for families not Dads. I have mine for 5 years and I love it!

[–] simple@lemm.ee 30 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It's really impressive how long it lasted considering the chip they use was already outdated when it came out.

[–] chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 16 points 4 months ago (1 children)

As long as the hardware is relatively close to the target level defined by Nintendo, it really doesn’t matter if the chip was “already old”. The developers know what hardware to expect, if they want their game to run on that console, they’d be on the hook to optimize for it.

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 4 months ago

In a lot of ways, it being an old known chip probably helped optimization and porting efforts.

[–] dinckelman@lemmy.world 25 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Well, it ended up a pretty solid console, after all. It's only real downside is the horrible performance. When the Switch "2" comes out, my only wish for it is to not have a SoC that's already a year outdated, at the time of release

[–] cm0002@lemmy.world 48 points 4 months ago (2 children)

my only wish for it is to not have a SoC that's already a year outdated

Nintendo: We don't do that here

[–] ouRKaoS@lemmy.today 21 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Nintendo stopped trying to push elite hardware after getting burned by the N64. They released a 64 bit console in an era of 32 bit consoles and didn't dominate is sales like they expected.

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 19 points 4 months ago (1 children)

They did with the GameCube.

The GameCube absolutely spanked the Dreamcast and PS2 in terms of performance, and wasn't far off the original Xbox.

[–] w2tpmf@lemmy.world 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The GameCube absolutely spanked the Dreamcast and PS2 in terms of performance

But the PS2 demolished the GameCube in sales. Thet outsold them about 8 to 1. So that just makes it another example of the high end hardware NOT helping their sales like the comment you replied to was saying.

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[–] kinkles@sh.itjust.works 12 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Wasn’t the GameCube the last one? Considering Wii was the first console they released that wasn’t graphically on-par with the competition.

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[–] RedStrider@lemmy.world 21 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

i've never cared about graphics in nintendo games, they don't need to be amazing like the steam deck. that's not the reason you buy a nintendo console.

however, i was was playing totk yesterday, and it was so clear that the switch is underpowered. so much stuttering, and the lack of an antialiasing filter in that game is so obvious.

[–] deepfriedchril@lemmy.world 10 points 4 months ago

The steam deck apu isn't even top of the line.

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[–] Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip 15 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

it will 100% be on a node thats outdated by the time of release. Nintendo goes out of their way wanting to make profit off hardware console sales. basically the last device they took a loss on hardware cost wise was the WiiU, and I shouldnt need to say how well that sold (and I know, I owned one)

rumors suggest Ampere based(2020) GPU with a few feature backports from Lovelace(2022) on Samsung 8nm (2018) for cost reasons.

Blackwell for nvidia will likely be out before the switch 2, making the switch 2 by the time of release, on a gpu 2 generations older than the current generation.

[–] ghostface@lemmy.world 13 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I think Valve is about to pull a Nintendo on Nintendo. While they have been playing 3d chess against Sony and Microsoft, by focusing on the pure gaming aspects of gaming. The one blind spot they have always maintained was modding, emulation, and hardware communities. That plus shift how Xbox live wasn't just a phase, but a elevation of the gaming experience.

Valve has stayed constant following the gamers and answering their calls and concerns. Stayed true to gamers and the developers.

As a life long Nintendo fan, this makes me happy and sad. picks up steamdeck

[–] dinckelman@lemmy.world 16 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Valve is in a very unique position here. They're clearly not making very much money on the Deck itself, and that's okay, because they both got an endless library of games behind them, and on top of that, they're actively putting money back into the ecosystem of developers, to further utilize what people already have. Historically, that's never been the case with any console, let alone a handheld, because every one of them either had bespoke architecture, or only ran software that was specifically designed for that machine

[–] Donjuanme@lemmy.world 6 points 4 months ago

It's like gamers grew tired of filling their storage with last generations games (maybe not last, but definitely 2 generations prior) media because we were told they wouldn't run on the next system.

Xbox S has actually brought me back to console gaming a bit because 1) my Internet is shit, and 2) I don't have to buy it rent physical media (2.5 I can play the games on my laptop as well, but I rarely use it since I've gotten the deck).

Valve, and to a lesser extent their deck, has filled that (niche is too small of a word) void nearly perfectly, valve and emulation has brought a dump truck and back hoe to the big 3's garden party.

[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 24 points 4 months ago (4 children)

I have to say. I love playing on the switch. I love how portable and practical it is. I hate the ergonomics in handheld mode though. I have to use an accessory. And yeah, the performance is pretty mediocre when games have advanced graphics or bad programming.

But as time goes by, with emulation, and access to every PC game title and all the ways you can plug stuff and hack the thing, the Steam Deck is looking more and more like a really good alternative and it's kind of making me regret ever getting the switch, which I originally got because of Zelda, really.

[–] MelodiousFunk 18 points 4 months ago (5 children)

Steam Deck is looking more and more like a really good alternative and it's kind of making me regret ever getting the switch, which I originally got because of Zelda, really.

Nothing that has come out since, or that could come out in the future, will ever make me regret hitting 360 hours in BotW, reflecting, "Was that worth a dollar an hour? Yes, yes it was." And then playing for another 600 hours.

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 10 points 4 months ago

When the sw0i0tch 0came out I was working 3rd shift at a shitty hotel. I told them I wasn't coming i0n for a week.

I literally took a week off for that game.

And when my boss tried saying "your request for time off has been denied" I replied with "Your opinion has been disregarded. I will not be in during these dates. Do with that information what you will."

I didn't give a shit if they fired me. I was making $8.00 an hour. If I still had a job a week later, alright. If not, alright.

Turns out they realized it would be harder to replace me than deal with me being gone a week. Either wQqay, I played that game NONSTOP for a week. Actually 8 days. On the 8th day I called and asked if they wanted me to come in. They said they'd get back to me.....but then they had issues contacting the manager. She was sleeping so she could stay awake all night. By the time they talked to her she was already on her way in. And by the time my shift was to start she was just now calling me. I was like "PSSSSHHHHH!!!! I called 4 hours ago. In order to be on time, I'd have had to start getting ready 3 hours ago. I'll see you tomorrow."

And played 1 more bonus day of game time.

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[–] lengau@midwest.social 6 points 4 months ago

I frigging love my Steam Deck. It's not about the fact that it's a more powerful machine, but rather the ergonomics.

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[–] EnderMB@lemmy.world 17 points 4 months ago (1 children)

While great and all, I think that this generation has been heavily impacted by COVID and chip shortages, so I think it's only fair for all manufacturers to basically add two years onto the lifespan of their consoles.

I've often been a critic of Nintendo, but the Switch is a fantastic device with a solid library of games behind it. Not only that, but for indie titles it's great. It probably gets more use than my PS4 and PS5 combined. For little kids, being able to take the console anywhere is a huge plus.

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[–] dandroid@sh.itjust.works 16 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I graduated college 3 months before the Switch came out. It really doesn't seem like that long ago...

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 23 points 4 months ago

Well the years start coming and they don't stop coming.....

[–] Corno@lemm.ee 15 points 4 months ago

It's a really great console. I love playing it while in bed, it's just a vibe of its own with so many great games!

[–] PanArab@lemm.ee 13 points 4 months ago (6 children)

As long as Switch 2 or whatever it may be called is backwards compatible. I hate that my Wii/Wii U collection is stuck on the Wii U.

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[–] Narann@lemmy.world 8 points 4 months ago (2 children)

…and I still have so much cool games to play on it…

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[–] Veticia@lemmy.ml 6 points 4 months ago (3 children)

I'm gonna play on my switch 1 until a revised switch 2 slim comes out. No need to rush.

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