“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.
I shouldn’t have to repair their crappy self-inflicted stick drift though. This easy to repair argument is like saying “It’s okay, the giant shit on your kitchen floor hasn’t dried so it’s easy to mop up.”
So first thing I notice was the top 1/3rd of the page being a blank space.
Then I remembered I had an adblocker.
That said, I rarely ever visit the website, but it looks like every generic blog/news theme format I’ve seen in the past 10 years or so lol. Never change a winning team, but it’s nothing to write home about to be honest.
What?! They have very unique squiggles and bright colors! No one else is doing that.
I really don’t get the logic of redesigns like this or The Verge. Was the design team just told, “traffic is down make it look new so we can post a blog about it”?
People pretty often completely understate the Vita’s popularity/lifespan. Less than the 3DS for sure, but early metrics were stupidly counting hardware sales when it was moving early to digital.
In Japan it stayed popular long after the USA stopped talking about it.
Haha, online games licensing sucks. It’s almost as if, when we discovered we could distribute media freely and infinitely by digital means, we should have restructured how media and licensing works for these products. but we didn’t, and now we have bizarre situations where publishers try to delete their own games from existence rather than spend some upkeep for music licensing
Like I agree with your general point but this has nothing to do with online games licensing besides its being pulled from digital store fronts. Brick and mortar stores can have product recalls as well and this would likely be in that same category of problem (its a bit weird with preowned games since publishers were already given their cut) so they can continue to sell those but a brand "new" copy may have suffered a similar fate but we have to remember Spec Ops the Line is from the 360 era so I doubt there would even been many "new" copies around. Also I can't fault publishers from just "deleting" a game from existence because spending thousands for merely upkeeping the licenses for a game they realistically haven't sold in major volumes for nearly half a decade (at minimum) seems a tad bit unreasonable. Most music labels likely aren't even going to sell a perpetual license as well, so its a can of worms of people wanting to get their cut.
The reviews so far have been fairly positive. I’m pretty eager to jump in to 2.0 tomorrow. I’ll have 5 days to get my new character ready for PL!
I just finished a playthrough a couple weeks ago with a Sandevistan+Katana build, which was SUPER fun! I was planning on going Stealth Netrunner for this play through but after seeing all the changes to the existing systems, I am tempted to go Sandy+Sword again. But I will probably control my urges and focus on Stealth to complement the “spy thriller” story of PL.
Honestly, if nothing else, I’m grateful for the fact that they give you a cyberware capacity - the extended gameplay trailer they showed implied that certain cyberwares would have a ‘humanity’ cost but the game had none of that on release, just treated like extra equipment slots, which was incredibly disappointing. Also it looks as though they’re not locking weapon upgrades behind the tech tree, which is great, because the fact that you could pick up uniques that would be useless in a few levels unless you dropped everything into tech (and even then) was also a major disappointment.
Yeah the crafting change is huge. It frees up a lot of points from “mandatory” crafting so you can really branch out more. Builds should be a lot more interesting and hard to screw up now.
The big change with cyberware that I like is 1 - You don’t have to go to every ripperdoc (or some online wiki) to find the bits you need anymore. Every ripperdoc sells everything. and 2 - You can upgrade it as you level so you don’t have to worry about “wasting money” buying low tier stuff early that you’ll have to replace later.
I hadn’t heard about those changes, but that’s quite a relief. I hated traveling to individual ripperdoc clinics to snag all the best upgrades. Especially because the best cyberware for your frontal cortex can only be bought from a VDB ripper in Pacifica, and I didn’t want to give those assholes any of my eddies.
Not to mention Fingers had the best Sandevistan and leg mods in the game and not punching him is SO HARD! Now neither of those mods are in the game anymore and you can safely beat the crap out of Fingers with no regrets.
Yeah and the new reworked Berserker cyberware to go with it! Gorilla Arms with the new relic perks to make them explode people from punching too hard… tempting indeed!
That seems like a great idea. Now that so many games are much less demanding on your gaming machine than others (playing a Phoenix Wright game, or Stardew Valley, or Minecraft), holding back a bit of power makes a lot of sense. If implemented right, I imagine you wouldn’t see any effect from this on most games.
It is arguable how much it is needed if games/libraries are coded “correctly”.
If a game is not resource intensive it won’t consume a lot of resources. This is why people who don’t understand power supplies might pop a breaker if they boot up the least AAA game but won’t have issues playing Stardew and the like. Or why you can get a few hours out of some games on the Steam Deck and MAYBE an hour with others.
If this is meaningfully effective then it speaks to something with the underlying Sony libraries (I forget the technical term) space filling resources. It sees memory is free so it uses memory and so forth. Which is pretty common with a lot of database/queuing software and why good practices tend to be restricting those with VMs.
Nah. Fuck the remnants of polygon (buncha scabs) but I think they are right that this has to do with setting a threshold/target for a potential handheld SKU. Basically the same thing MS had with the Series X vs S.
Just to provide a bit more. A common way of thinking of it is you have a static and a dynamic energy cost. Running the CPU at all costs a certain amount of power (static). But doing actual work on it costs more power on top (dynamic). So a completely idle chip is just the static and a balls to the walls run is static and 100% of the dynamic.
You can potentially turn off parts of chips to reduce the static cost (e.g. run with 4 cores active instead of 6) but that tends to require significant hardware support. And… most literature on the subject tends to e that it is still better to just run until the proverbial sweat runs down your crack because you’ll consume less power than if you had run lower for longer.
And it wasn’t even news back then. Almost immediately after the BG3 release Swen Vincke talked about the next project being an in-house IP again. And not much later they quit working on a DLC.
Since when do you have to link your phone number to your Steam account? I’ve had an account for as long as Steam has existed, and I’ve never been asked to provide my phone number.
No they’re aren’t competitors. I’d wager a significant portion (probably the majority even) of Switch users have never heard of the Steam Deck or even less so the other handhelds.
Steam Deck has it’s fans but like everything in life just because you love it doesn’t mean the majority of people have any clue about it.
I think to the “early adopter” crowd, the people like me who where huffing Nintendo “NX” leaks back in 2016, the more “core” audience of people from the ages of late teens to however old James Rolfe is now.
Those people will probably buy a steam deck before a switch 2. There are a lot of them.
Though not as many people as there are like my ex-sister-in-law and her new bf who put together have four kids. The Linux PC I built them to make sure their kids had a good puter is enough trouble, even with me to help. I don’t see them even considering them for their kids.
That being said I also think many of those people will stick to their current console until they release a cost reduced “switch 2 lite”.
Buying a new $450 console for every kids plus $80 games is fucking brutal and most parents won’t put up with that shit when a used switch lite is like $100-150.
I see this hitting their initial sales a lot more than their sales over the new consoles life span, especially as people who chose steam deck, and the parents who waited, slowly grab a switch 2 during sales/price drops.
polygon.com
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