Steam Deck will not be able to compete with Switch 2 for first party titles since it can barely emulate Switch games at a decent frame rate. Will likely need a proper gaming PC to emulate S2 first party titles. For all other games, Steam Deck wins because the games don’t cost $80, vastly bigger selection, mods work, etc.
Considering this console comes after the Deck and the other handhelds, shouldn’t be the other way around?
Btw to answer the question:
Few exclusive titles (for now)
Not great performance to some last year triple A game (like cyberpunk 2077)
The damn price of the games
The answer is: Yes. Any decently performing handheld right now is a better alternative. RIGHT NOW. In a year, with more exclusive titles and ( let’s hope) better game prices, who knows.
Yeah. I’m 100% who Nintendo is trying to lure with this launch, and honestly I’m a little ticked off about it–I’ve really wanted Metroid Prime 4 for a long time, but now it’s coming out and I have to choose between playing an inferior version or shelling out over $500 to play the good version. ($450 for the system, $80 for the game, and compatible SD cards in sizes larger than the internal storage of the new system don’t even exist yet.) So I’m inclined to wait, and see if there are enough good games to justify the Switch 2 purchase eventually, but they’re going to count that as poor initial sales for Prime 4. It might kill the franchise. Replaying some of my switch titles with upgraded performance might have been enough to motivate me to make the move, but they’re also going to charge extra for that. That’s…not great. Nickle-and-diming on top of a much more expensive system with even more expensive games is just ugly.
It definitely has me thinking about getting a PC handheld instead. A lot of what I was picturing was second-screen gaming while watching TV or YouTube, and the Deck is definitely a competitor in that space. There are a bunch of people saying that “oh, the reason you buy a Nintendo system is to play Nintendo exclusives,” which, yeah, that is a selling point, but for the original switch, just being a portable system that played modern games was also a selling point. That second factor is absolutely going up against the Deck, and frankly losing, because Steam has everything. Switch 2 has to go all in on the exclusives, and that’s a much tougher sell, especially since they don’t have the gold mine of good games nobody had played that they had from the Wii U to pad the release schedule.
Maybe they’ll amaze me, but I see them being very unhappy with the revenue from this console in a couple of years, and casting about for stupid shit to blame. And I think they’re gonna blame Metroid. It’s not Metroid, guys. Metroid is great. It’s the pricing.
“In a sense, Nintendo is the victim of its own strategic foresight. With the Switch, it was the first to spot that the narrowing gap in processing power between mobile and at-home devices had enabled a unification of handheld and home gaming experiences.”
I was out after this. This is patently wrong. Crucially, Nintendo capitalised on the failure of the vita using the exact same strategy but with a caveat: 3rd party memory cards.
The PSVita had the power to play former gen games in a compact format and MUCH better connectivity than the switch. It failed on the stupid memory cards. Nintendo did not. That’s pretty much it. Sony had the AAA handheld market with the PSP and blew it. I’d be very surprised if something like this wasn’t uttered by an MBA regard in sony’s corpo structure:
“If we divide our playerbase between handheld and dedicated living room console too much it will damage our business”.
So instead of capitalising on a massive library of games that could easily have been ported to a handheld format (the PS4 had 1,4TFlops, we’ve surpased that on mobile before the PS5 launched) SONY decided to double down on AAA and subsequently in live service games, and here we are…
If someone can create a handheld AAA console is a team lead by mark cerny with the support of AMD. To this day I don’t know how we end up with PS portal instead…
So here we are, Sony carved out a niche (AAA and fidelity) from the Nintendo handheld success, and just decided to sit on their hands with it. There was exactly 0 foresight from Nintendo. They knew from the beginning the living room was lost to either MS or Sony to begin with.
Nintendo got to the Switch via the Wii U and through the realization that they could package similar hardware with affordable off-the-shelf parts and still drive a TV output that was competitive with their "one-gen-old-with-a-gimmick" model for home consoles.
It was NOT a handheld with AAA games, it was a home console you could take with you. That is how they got to a point where all the journalists, reviewers and users that spent the Vita's lifetime wondering who wanted to play Uncharted on a portable were over the moon with a handheld Zelda instead.
So yeah, turns out the read the article has is actually far closer to what happened than yours, I'm sorry to say.
Yes, that’s why they took an ARM based Tegra (like the vita with the powerVR from imagination tech) unlike the in-house wiiu tech… Why look at evidence when we can ignore it and just BS to defend my fav plastic box maker…
Also, the WiiU is basically the PSP remote play in one package, 6y later…
C’mon man, do Nintendo fanboys really have to ape Apple fanboys for everything. Next thing you’re going to tell me how palworld should be sued to the ground…
They took the Tegra because it was sitting in some Nvidia warehouse and they could get it for cheap, or at least get it manufactured for cheap. At least that's what the grapevine says about how that came together. It does fit Nintendo's MO of repurposing older, affordable parts in new ways.
I always get a kick of being called a Nintendo fanboy. For one thing, I don't fanboy. Kids fanboy, and I haven't been one of those in ages. I don't root for operating systems or hardware. I don't even root for sports teams.
For another, back when I was a kid I was a Sega kid. My first Nintendo console was a Gamecube. I was an adult at that point. As a teenager I had a Saturn. I stand by that choice to this day. Better game library than the Dreamcast. Fight me.
But that doesn't change what happened. The Wii U bombed extremely hard, but there was certainly something to the idea of flipping screens. The Switch is ultimately a tweaked Nvidia Shield and little else. The R&D around it clearly went into seamlessly switching the output from handheld to TV and the controllers from attached to detached. And you know what? They killed it on that front. People don't give enough thought to how insane it is that the Switch not only seamlessly changes outputs when docked, but it also overclocks its GPU in real time and switches video modes to flip resolution, typically in less time than it takes the display to detect the new input and show it onscreen.
It's extremely well tuned, too. If you hear devs talk about it, in most cases it takes very little tuning to match docked and handheld performance because the automatic overclock is designed to match the resolution scale.
The Switch didn't succeed (and the Wii U didn't fail) at random. Similar as some of the concepts at play are, the devil is in the detail. Nintendo sucks at many things, but they got this right. Competitors stepping into this hybrid handheld space ignore those details at their peril, and that includes the Switch 2.
At least that’s what the grapevine says about how that came together.
This is when I stopped reading because this is demonstrably false. The 214 scratches the Cortex 53 cores and is semi-custom hardware. That also ignores the obvious deal to cheapen the Tegras, which was basically handing NVIDIA the Chinese market on a silver platter, which Nintendo really didn’t cater at all…
AMD had nothing low power/long battery to offer but the jaguar at the time, so Nintendo had to deal with one of the most hated companies in order to get a competitive mobile chip, rather than doing it in-house with licensed off the shelf ARM chips like before. They took a page from SONY and went with a custom GPU based solution, but lacking a solid hardware department (AMD did a lot of the heavy lifting over the years) they just went with NVIDIA because there was almost no other game in town at that price (see Chinese market above, no one else was trying to get into streaming for the Chinese market and needed a strong game library).
That’s it
Edit: regarding output switching… You must be using an apple phone and never heard of MHL… Jesus… It’s like with Apple fans, shit exists for a decade but they honestly think it was Apple that came up with it. M8, and let’s not start with the joycons, they are pretty shit, prone to failure and the design is so garbage that even Nintendo spent R&D not to use that trash sliding mechanism again…
I would recommend continuing to read, then. Or re-reading. None of the detail you provided contradicts what I said at any point.
In fact, the ultimate takeaway is exactly the same. Feel free to substitute all that detail at the point where you "stopped reading" and keep going from there. It's as good a response as you're going to get from me.
Although, since you're going to be anal about the historical detail, it's incorrect that Nintendo "didn't cater at all" the Chinese market, they had a presence there through the iQue brand all the way up to the 3DS and these days they ship the Switch there directly through Tencent. I wasn't in the room to know what the deal with Nvidia was. I have to assume the Shield ports were both low hanging fruit and some part of it, but I seriously doubt it was a fundamental part of the deal to not compete with them there, considering that it took them like two years after the Switch launch and just one after they stopped running their own operation to partner up with Tencent. You'd think "handing the Chinese market on a silver platter" would include some noncompete clause to prevent that scenario.
In any event, we seem to agree that Nvidia was the most affordable partner that could meet the spec without making the hardware themselves. So... yeah, like I said, feel free to get to the actual point if you want to carry on from there.
The Vita had far more problems than just memory cards. You came very close to identifying what the real problem was, Sony couldn't sustain supporting two separate platforms at once. And conversely, Nintendo unifying onto a single platform was what saved the Switch.
There’s some overlap in customers, sure but the vast majority of people who buy a Switch 2 aren’t the types who would buy a Deck. Switch 2 will sell tens of millions more units to a mainstream consumer. And that’s fine. Deck can still be a successful product in its own right as long as Valve is making a profit off of it through Steam software sales.
I think the trailer and Steam page makes it pretty clear that this isn’t just aimed at furries. Not that furries won’t jump on it - we will, but it’s not just for furries.
Yeah, 100%. It’s just that usually when something like this gets a large-ish negative reaction it’s because people associate it with furries or some other “taboo” fetish/lifestyle.
I also find that furry stuff gets way more hate than it deserves (which is none hate). I say boo to that! So long as stuff is consensual and nobody gets hurt (who doesn’t want to, lookin’ at you BDSM), then let people enjoy things.
Side note: It’s hilarious how for years people were cheering on Captain Kirk for banging green alien chicks, but cat ears and a tail is a no-go. Cross-species stuff is cool so long as they’re from another planet? What if it was planet Yiff? On the topic of aliens, do we even know if Superman has a human-like penis? Maybe Kryptonians bust onto egg clutches, who’s to say?
Anywho, people are silly and really like policing other people’s likes.
I’ve almost completely stopped keeping up with M:TG these days. I used to be into it but it just feels like it’s completely jumped the shark these days.
so i sold out of mtg around covid and they started committing to “universe beyond”. but all signs point to their stupid shit being profitable for the time being. and the new UB stuff will now be going through standard will help their new player onboarding a bit.
Lord of the Rings was massively successful, and I’ve been seeing even more buzz for Final Fantasy than there was LotR. Universes Beyond is certainly here to stay.
exactly. but you can’t just keep farming UB forever. you need to onboard them into the ecosystem and keep them hooked in. time will tell if these people only cared about their specific media or if enough latch on to mtg the game.
I enjoyed the early mythos of M:tG, but I already started losing interest when they went all Marvel with their whole Gatewatch thing.
Even though individual sets (like LOTR) have been well made and successful, the whole Universes Beyond thing just further dilutes the identity of Magic too much for me. I’m sick of endless exploitation of existing IPs from all over the entertainment business. I understand why they do it from a financial perspective, but it doesn’t appeal to me at all.
Add to that the endless garbage of Secret Lair drops like goddamn Spider-Man and SpongeBob and I think MTG just isn’t for me anymore.
Honestly, as someone close to the game, it’s more of “we can’t make the casuals and competitive players happy while catering to collectors all at the same time” and Gavin is using Pauper to test something that has ramifications for the rest of the game.
But here’s the catch, Pauper has been incredible this whole time! These bans/unbans are dope! I think this will work and it does set the precedent for the idiot business people that you can manage a format independent of design teams and stockholders.
First time for a “trial unban” where they go back to the ban list if they don’t positively impact the format? Yes, this is the first time an official “trial” has occurred in the competitive history of the game. The only time they have come close to this was the original ban of High Tide when paper and online ban lists merged.
I’m not talking about unbans in general and neither is the article.
I concur that unbans are usually a reaction to power creep. However, Modern has always been a mismanaged format since it’s inception. The premise of banning the top decks so that Modern was different from “Old Extended” (because Extended at the time became a “Double long Standard” instead of a rotating Type 2 Format) damaged the genesis of the format, which inevitably led to Grixis Twin’s dominance. I do think the format back then could’ve benefitted from Fae/Sculpter/Thopter-Sword/Affinity being legal and providing variance.
they’ve unbanned cards in the past. most recently(not in this ban/unbanning) mox opal and splinter twin in modern. SFM and mind sculptor were also unbanned years ago. unbanning cards is not unheard of.
I can’t tell if this is just Wizards of the Coast panicking and flailing because they are out of good ideas, or if they are actually carefully analyzing and re-evaluating older cards because the balance and synergy of the current cards allow for the use of these older cards without being game breaking.
Hearthstone was doing this about a year ago when I quit. It was actually great for the game and really shook things up in the Wild format where you could play any set of cards. But Blizzard shit the bed on that one like usual, oh well.
Maybe that’s part of the problem? HDR implementation on my Samsung sets is garbage, I have to disable it to watch anything. Too bad too, because the picture is gorgeous without it.
Smart TV having absolutely horrible default settings and filters that ruin any viewing experience has little to do with HDR because the TV isn‘t even processing HDR images most of the time. That stuff is already mixed and there‘s not much any device can do to give you details in the darks and brights back. It‘s a much different story when you‘re actually processing real color information like in a video game. HDR should absolutely help you see in the dark here.
I WISH it was the default settings. I went through every calibration and firmware update I could find. Even the model specific calibrations on rtings.com. Nothing made a difference.
It appears to just be a flaw in Samsung’s implementation. After going through all the Samsung forum information, the only suggestion that’s guaranteed to work is “turn it off”.
I got a samsung monitor last year too (it was the cheapest hdr option and I keep seeing reddit praise them) and it has such a terrible hdr experience. When hdr is on either dark colors are light grayish, brights are too dark, darks are crushed, everything’s too bright or colors are over saturated. I’ve tried every combination of adjusting brightness / gamma from the screen and/or from kde but couldn’t figure out a simple way to easily turn down the brightness at night without some sort of image issue popping up. So recently I gave up and turned hdr off. Still can’t use the kde brightness slider without fucking up the image but at least the monitor’s brightness slider works now.
Also if there are very few bright areas on the screen it further decreases its overall screen brightness, which also affects color saturation bcz of course.
Also also just discovered freesync and vrr are two different toggles in two different menus for some fucking reason and if you only enable freesync like I did you get a flickering screen
I really wish there was a ‘no smart image fuckery’ toggle in the settings.
I didn’t really understand the benefit of HDR until I got a monitor that actually supports it.
And I don’t mean simply can process the 10-bit color values, I mean has a peak brightness of at least 1000 nits.
That’s how they trick you. They make cheap monitors that can process the HDR signal and so have an “HDR” mode, and your computer will output an HDR signal, but at best it’s not really different from the non-HDR mode because the monitor can’t physically produce a high dynamic range image.
If you actually want to see an HDR difference, you need to get something like a 1000-nit OLED monitor (note that “LED” often just refers to an LCD monitor with an LED backlight). Something like one of these: www.displayninja.com/best-oled-monitor/
These aren’t cheap. I don’t think I’ve seen one for less than maybe $700. That’s how much it costs unfortunately. I wouldn’t trust a monitor that claims to be HDR for $300.
When you display an HDR signal on a non-HDR display, there are basically two ways to go about it: either you scale the peak brightness to fit within the display’s capabilities (resulting in a dark image like in OP’s example), or you let the peak brightness max out at the screen’s maximum (kinda “more correct” but may result in parts of the image looking “washed out”).
See my “set 2” links above. (at the time) $3,200 8K television, “If you want the brightest image possible, use the default Dynamic Mode settings with Local Dimming set to ‘High’, as we were able to get 1666 nits in the 10% peak window test.”
Nope, it does have wide color gamut and high-ish brightness, wouldn’t buy unless reviews said it was ok. But it does some fuckery to the image I can only imagine could be to make non-hdr content pop on windows but ends up messing up the image coming from kde. I can set it up to look alright in either in a light or dark environment but the problem is I can’t quickly switch between them without fiddling with all the settings again.
Compared to my cooler master a grayscale gradient on it has a much sharper transition from crushed bright to gray but then gets darker much slower as well, to a point where unless a color is black it appears darker on the cm despite it having an ips screen. Said gray also shows up as huge and very noticable red green and blue bands on it, again unlike the cm which also has banding but at least the tones of gray are similiar.
Also unrelated but just noticed while testing the monitors, max sdr brightness slider of kde seems to have changed again. Hdr content gets darker on the last 200 nits while sdr gets brighter. Does anyone know anything about that? I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to work
3 months edit: I might’ve been wrong about this. At the time I had both monitors connected to the motherboard (amd igpu) since the nvidia driver had washed out colors. Since the cooler master worked I assumed the amd drivers were fine. But a while back I ended up plugging both into the nvidia gpu and discovered that not only were the nvidia drivers fixed, but with it the Samsung didn’t have the weird brightness issue neither.
Edit edit: Even though the brightness is more manageable it’s still fucked. I’ve calibrated it with kde’s new screen calibration tool and according to it the brightness tops out at 250 nits. However it is advertised and benchmarked to go up to 600 and I’ve measured 800 ish using my phone sensor, and it looks much brighter than an sdr 200 nit monitor. Which makes me think even though it is receiving hdr signal, it doesn’t trust the signal to be actually hdr and maps sdr range to its full range instead; causing all kinds of image issues when the signal is actually hdr.
And just to make sure it’s not a linux issue I’ve tried it with windows 10 too. With amd gpu hdr immediately disables itself if you enable it and with nvidia gpu if you enable hdr all screens including ones not connected to it turn off and don’t work until you unplug the monitor and reboot. Cooler master just works
Yeesh sounds like your monitors color output is badly calibrated :/. Fixing that requires an OS level calibration tool. I’ve only ever done this on macOS so I’m not sure where it is on Windows or Linux.
Also in general I wouldn’t use the non-hdr to hdr conversion features. Most of them aren’t very good. Also a lot of Linux distros don’t have HDR support (at least the one I’m using doesn’t).
It’s one of those things where it looks good where in like the case of a video game, the GAME’s implementation of it is good AND your Console/PCs implementation is good AND your TV/Monitor’s implementation is good. But like unless you’ve got semi-deep pockets, at least one of those probably isn’t good, and so the whole thing is a wash.
polygon.com
Aktywne