“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!
Not where I am. There are kids and old people playing alike. Sure, there are some collectors, but there always will be. Hell, the ATLA set has really good jump start packs, which are explicitly for playing
Nobody even plays the Pokemon TCG. Well, I guess a couple dozen people might, but that’s about it.
The video games are basically the same game repackaged over and over again. No disrespect to people who like Pokemon of course, but the Pokemon Company could do a lot more than they do now. But it has stuck around because people really like the brand for some reason.
MTG, on the other hand, is shitting itself currently, but the core gameplay has evolved over 30+ years into the framework for a very detailed game with countless possible interactions. There are dozens of actively played formats for the game, and despite WOTC’s best attempts, will not be dying anytime soon.
E33 is not even in the same category as those games. To begin with, it’s a single game, not a whole franchise. It seems a bit unfair to compare it to those games in terms of staying power. Regarding gameplay, E33 is far more interesting than Pokemon. It doesn’t have the same depth as MTG or D&D, but MTG’s comprehensive rules is a PDF with around 300 pages, and D&D has entire rulebooks. E33 is far easier for people to learn than those two games as a result.
Chess, uh, is not a very popular game. People play it of course, but it stuck around because of its history. Also, the demographic of people playing video games regularly and classic board games regularly doesn’t have a huge amount of overlap.
Server load is not a great indicator of how good a game is.
Silksong is an excellent game but it’s absolutely not in the same league. COE33 is a much more sophisticated game with deeper story and advanced artwork.
Silksong was 1/3 the price so they could sell many more copies, and COE33 didn’t have nearly the same hype on launch. None of that makes Silksong a better game.
IMHO fart sniffing pick and the only person I know who will play it is a persona fan.
The description and trailers don’t seem revolutionary or mind blowing. Just a pretty turn based with a story that EA or Ubisoft didn’t half ass. BF6 just went on sale for $40 from $70 and is the best selling game of the year.
And never will. The total selling point is “a deep story” and but I haven’t heard single specific that sounds deep or even interesting.
You come off like the kid who insisted I play Persona. It’s not that deep, try some more adult media. We have a guy here on Lemmy who highly recommends A Brave New World 🥲
As far as I understand it, the comparisons pretty much end at the combat system / gameplay mechanics.
Without giving away too much, you have a world where, every year, everybody of a certain age is erased. Every year, those with one year left to live set out to try and stop that from happening - and for ~77 years, none of them have returned.
This sets the stage for exploration of grief, loss, and associated trauma. In most games, there’s death everywhere but the emotional side is relegated to a 3 minute scene with sad piano music before the characters get back to the action. In this game, they drill a lot deeper and it really makes the characters come alive.
They’ve nailed the blend of sadness, joy, and even comedy.
This is all then set in a backdrop of some of the most visually interesting environments ever presented in a videogame with a completely insane musical score that brings all of those moments to life, the game is effectively a frisson machine.
I’ll add to the other comment for anyone else that’s actually open to new things, because I traditionally don’t like turn based games:
The combat is excellent and the enemies are varied. Party members have fun synergies with both your team and the enemies, and the Pictos system adds a ton of flexibility for each character. You can have some crazy setups, at one point I gave a character the explosive death + instant-death perk which let me skip a lot of the easy battles later on.
Plus there is a parrying mechanic that is challenging and rewarding!
So, from the way you talk about it, it seems you’re describing your feelings about the game moreso than an attempt at an objective take. Which is good, because there is no such thing as an objective take, and I definitely understand the perspective of not liking something that you feel is inexplicably ultra-popular. Especially if you feel that there was something you liked more that you’d rather see get the award.
That said, I do wonder how much you’ve seen of the game? Because I haven’t played it either, but everything I’ve seen strongly suggests that it is a genuine work of art that people put effort and passion into. Which – since you brought it up – is not a description I’d apply to Battlefield 6. So I’m kinda left wondering what specifically about it might put you off enough to want to slag it off like this.
If you’re upset at it for winning a billion awards, that’s fair. Most awards shows are always very silly and this one game getting practically showered honestly highlights that a lot — even a really good game like this probably didn’t deserve quite this many accolades. Still though, it looks to have a clear message, purpose, with good art and gameplay to go along. I think that deserves some awards.
Agreed. As much as I don’t care about Silksong either way, having “so many people wanted me, I broke the storefront” on your resume has to count for something.
so a strange, grandfathered loophole. Doesn’t help the new subscribers, and there are plenty of reasons to cancel Game Pass besides the steep price for Day One games. But sure, I guess there is probably a narrow raft of subscribers that will stay happily subscribed, thanks to this loophole, despite the price increases across the board.
My understanding was that all plans were going up in price. Evidently, this grandfathered plan is not. I’m just not sure how many people are left on that plan, it can’t be many if they are continuing to allow it
This is not a “loophole”, but normal business. Game Pass is not the only service who keep the old contract for current subscribers. This way people think twice if they cancel, because they would “loose” the cheaper price and day one releases and so on, its the same contract as before, which is a huge difference to the new.
Usually this sort of contract only applies for the term of the subscription, and then the company can change whatever they like at the end of that term.
The article even specifies that the grandfathered plan only continues to exist because Microsoft is “allowing” it.
When asked, an Xbox spokesperson did not confirm how long legacy Console subscriptions will remain active for current subscribers.
So I get what you are saying, but in this specific case, there is no legal reason why Microsoft could not force current subscribers to move to one of the new, more expensive plans. They are just being nice to some of their most loyal users, for some reason.
polygon.com
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