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.
That was less a Nintendo thing than a retailer thing. Retailers didn't take kindly to being undercut, first parties got to keep more of the revenue, so there was literally no incentive anywhere to make digital cheaper.
But let's be clear, everybody involved except for the retailer made a lot less for a physical copy in that scenario. The real thing that changed here is Nintendo isn't afraid of not having shelf space anymore.
And while key-in-cart means retailers still keep a cut, storage costs on Switch cartridges are HUGE, so there's still an incentive to get users to subsidize storage.
Physical games weren't cheaper at MSRP, but retailers were known to put them on sale or lower their price permanently more frequently than Nintendo's eShop.
Not true. Switch licensing works the exact same way as Playstation licensing. All accounts on your "main" console can play the same digital game, even offline. Your account can play digital games on any console as long as it's logged in and connected to the Internet.
It has tons of emotes (or things that can double as emotes) and multiplayer. In a world where making game characters expressive was not a thing, much less at the player's command, they felt like puppets.
Hah. As a kid I used to just hang out or make up stories in Lucasarts games, like Monkey Island and especially Maniac Mansion. I know I wasn't alone, because there were multipe contemporary games built around that idea, including form Lucas, even before The Sims came out. Toe Jam and Earl 2: Panic on Funkotron was also a good, weird roleplaying avenue.
And I did engage in some amount of "let's make my house in this map editor" back when games came with map editors. We all did, I think.
Oh, and some games I'd play just to listen to the music. It's hard to argue this was unintended, though, given how many games had sound test modes. I remember I'd fire up Panzer Dragoon just to gawk at the intro, which I realize seems silly if you look at it now.
You can enter a text prompt and they spit out a texture based on it, which sure seems to just be a good old image generation model. They do generate mesh from images, which probably has some ML involved, although it's harder to tell how much is just good old photogrammetry, and they do face and body animation from video source. I think that's all part of the Unreal Engine 5 metahuman package, which I'm pretty sure does use some machine learning. Oh, and I am pretty sure a bunch of the writing and character AI has been machine-created, be it in real time or baked offline.
Part of the problem is that people aren't super clear on what "AI" is supposed to mean, so it's hard to know what they're supposed to be angry about. The texture generation thing at least is clearly in the GenAI danger zone.
How is it based on UGC if the game wasn't out when they implemented the GenAI? As far as I can tell they're using a whole bunch of ML-based tools built on Unreal tech for animation and model creation and what seems to be run of the mill Gen AI for textures. I could be wrong, but hey, I'll hold you to that being cool when EA or Ubisoft show up with their version of the same thing.
Given how many features use generative AI to build user-generated content I would say mark this moment. There is a future of slop-centric Roblox stuff everywhere and this may well be where it starts.
I'm not as mad about that as most will be, but... yeah, I've mentioned a couple of times around here how weird it is that nobody is really bringing it up so far.
I don't know that Nintendo was forcing the issue for profit. I also don't know the costs and margins (if any) for Nintendo or who they were working with to get the storage, to be fair. But I have to assume that if Nintendo had signficantly cheaper access to storage and was artificially throttling to everybody else you'd have seen more first party games on larger carts, and that wasn't necessarily the case.
Regardless, any solid state storage was always going to be more expensive than optical storage and scale up with size gradually in a way that optical storage doesn't (until you have to go to a second disk or an additional layer, at least). Cartridges are just inherently riskier and more expensive, even at the relatively modest spec of the Switch 1. Definitely with what seems like competitive speeds in Switch 2.
That doesn't mean one has to like the consequences of it. At the same time I'm not sure I can imagine a realistic alternative for a portable. We're not doing UMD again, so...
Switch 1 carts HAD to be purchased from Nintendo. It wasn't an off the shelf part. They weren´t SD cards priced commercially, they were a specific order that was part of manufacturing a physical copy and stacked up on top of printing labels and paperwork, making cases, shipping them to stores and so on. Margins for physical media are garbage as it is, but Switch carts were significantly more expensive than, say, a PS5 BluRay and they crucially ramped up quickly with size.
Technically the carts were available to higher sizes, but there's a reason you very rarely saw any Switch 1 games with cart sizes bigger than 16 gigs. Basically the more stuff you put in your game the more expensive it was to physically make the boxed copies. Crucially, that is a cost you had to pay whether you sold the carts or not. It was a manufacturing cost.
Look, at this point it's hardly worth it trying to wrap one's head around industrial retailed boxed copy software manufacturing, but trust me, physical Switch games were relatively and absolutely expensive to make in an environment where digital distribution was king and the next most expensive version was dirt cheap optical media.
I'm not sure that's how that works. The Switch already had both physical boxes with digital codes in them and cartridges that required mandatory downloads to run. This seems like a physical unlock key for a digital download, which depending on how it's implemented is actually easier to both resell and use offline than the Switch 1 solution to the same problem.
I don't recommend purchasing either, and I avoided both of those options on Switch 1, but I'm pretty sure this at least does not make things any worse.
I have major gripes with a number of pricing choices in this thing, but to the best of my current understanding this one is based on a misunderstanding.
Oh, I missed the UHD bit, right. Triple layer it'd cap at 20-25, yeah. Technically Switch carts were available up to 32GB, but I think like one or two games ever used that much, they were so expensive. That's where the partial download stuff comes in.
Of course for optical media the solution was always to ship multiple discs, because the smaller discs are so cheap. Or were. With most optical media manufacturing phased out who knows how expensive optical will become.
Good question. What was the UMD, 1GB? From the DVD default, which was 4GB single layer and 8 dual layer? Blurays are 25GB single layer,so 25% of that is like 7gigs, which is still smaller than the 16gigs the larger Switch carts were. But hey, a lot of games on Switch were smaller, dual layer discs would get you almost to the same size and be a fraction of the cost.
Well, the discs would be. I have no idea how much the weird plastic caddy on UMDs pushed the price up.
I don't know about that. Reception to most of this Direct seems to be positive, they have a literal 10x sales advantage and 150 million people already in the ecosystem.
I wouldn't be surprised if it sold a lot slower, but half as fast as the Switch 1 is still faster than the PS5 and much faster than the Steam Deck.
Will PC handhelds gain some ground? Maybe, I'm curious to see.
Yeah, it definitely puts their overhaul of digital game sharing in perspective. They are ABSOLUTELY shifting to digital. I wouldn't be surprised if the Switch 2 Lite had no cartridge slot at all.
That said, their idea here seems to be that you have a physical cart with a game license in it so you can download the game on multiple consoles and then just swap the key around. That is not a new idea, but it goes to show how frustrated by the limitations of having to ship flash memory with every game they are.