Be honest, you were ready to do some hounding, saw that tackled preemptively and decided to pivot. I can see the hounding intent from here. Those ears are so droopy you're becoming a better boy as we speak.
I've been increasingly frustrated with clickbaity coverage and headlines. Credit to Polygon for being just as obviously opinionated as Gamesradar but titling and writing their piece way more professionally.
I mean, yeah, Ubisoft's lawyers are arguing that the arguments of a lawsuit against them are wrong, that's hardly surprising. Given that they're being sued for taking down an online game they would certainly argue that they had no obligation to keep the game online indefinitely.
It's an interesting case and there are... creative arguments on both sides, but being mad that Ubisoft would argue that the text of their EULA applies seems so weird.
For the record, and because I'll be hounded for this, I've signed all relevant petitions to request regulation about digital ownership that creates an obligation to provide offline versions or access to server code. I'm all for making it illegal to build planned obsolescence into software. That doesn't mean I'm not bothered with bad journalism that I happen to agree with.
That's nice. Gamecube replicas are a bit of a niche case, but there are plenty of expensive fight sticks that would be great to use if compatible. I guess we'll know for sure once it's out.
It's also true of the partial download carts for Switch 1 that don't include a full playable version of the game in the cart.
Presumably the digital back-compat on the Switch 2 means the Switch will live a lot longer usual for Nintendo platforms, and we don't know if there will be a backwards compatible Switch 3.
But in practice, this is just an iteration of the Switch 1 version of the same thing. It's not great. I avoided both the mandatory download carts and will likely avoid these ones, but it's not a bigger deal than it has been for the past five years or so.
They said it about the DS at the time. It was meant to run in parallel with the GBA as a "premium" thing for adults. They said it about the SNES, too, actually.
This bit of random outrage is fun to me because it's something that has been Nintendo's official stance since the early 90s, but it's swung back around due to Don Mattrick being such a charisma black hole that what used to be the natural, go-to response to "how come the new, more advanced version is more expensive" has now become a genuine snafu.
I genuinely can't tell if milking outrage is more prominent in gaming than elsewhere. I guess not, because... I mean, look at the planet in general, but it does feel like gamers got to that state of mind first and do it best, at least.
So it seems this may just refer to "official support" and the piece of news is at least misinformation-adjacent, but it does make me wonder if there is any forwards compatibility with the Pro Controller. There are plenty of solid alternatives for Switch 1 and that wasn't particularly picky about taking in third party devices.
Not sure if anybody has brought it up in the news deluge.
I mean, yeah, mostly I use portables at home, but I do bring them with me. It's a 50-50 chance whether I overcome the social awkwardness of pulling out a game system in a packed train or plane, but... you know, hotels are a thing.
The real question is which handheld do you bring with you. Pre-pandemic it was the Switch or the 3DS. When I had a long train commute me and my friends got into Mario Kart DS on local multiplayer for a while. When I was alone I did tend to carry a PSP, which at the time was also my media player of choice. By the time I moved to PC handhelds from the aging Switch I wasn't really travelling, but the couple times I did the Deck seemed a bit too large and I do have a smaller Windows handheld I can use instead. Smaller retro emulation handhelds are cute and portable, but a bit too limited. A couple times I packed a controller to go with my laptop.
I'm confused. The article you linked seems to very clearly agree with me:
In terms of performance, the Switch 2 is clearly more powerful than the Steam Deck before we even start talking about cooperation with NVIDIA, DLSS upscaling, and tighter game optimizations possible when developing for a fixed console hardware platform.
I mean, yeah, that tracks and is verifiable. It's a more power hungry APU (although admittedly on a larger node), it has more cores on both the CPU and GPU side, a higher resolution and framerate screen. Storage seems to fall somewhere between the cheaper and more expensive Deck models and, while it has less memory it's also... you know, a console, so there's presumably less overhead and the RAM itself is a bit faster, which is very relevant to APUs. The Switch 2 is built on Ampere, while the Deck is on RDNA 2. Both launched in 2020, but I think it's not controversial to say that Nvidia had the edge on both features and performance for that gen.
It is absolutely true that Nintendo traditionally latched on to older, less performant components paired with hardware investment elsewhere, but the Switch was a huge outlier there. If you consider it against handhelds it stood alone as the single most powerful one. Granted, the Vita was the closest comparison and that was a whole generation behind, but I can't stress enough how outclassed it is against the original Switch. The need to push a TV display from a mobile chipset ended up making the Switch a genuinely beefy handheld.
The Switch 2 is interesting because besides iterating on that requirement it also seems like a very deliberate response to the Deck and PC handhelds. It seems intentionally designed to be competitive against the current set of those. I wouldn't be surprised to find that Nintendo pushed the price and performance up a bit specifically for that reason, frankly. It seems egnineered specifically to not feel outdated at launch, even if it will presumably be outclassed again in a couple of years.
And for the record, I'm not "white knighting" Nintendo. They're famously ruthless, litigious and quirky bordering on unreasonableness. Not white knighting (or grinding an axe against) Valve, either. They're also ruthless and quirky bordering on unreasonableness, although clearly much, much better at PR with core gamers. I am actively hostile towards Nintendo's approach to a number of things (primarily emulation) and to Valve's approach to a number of things (primarily their gig economy approach to game development and their monopolistic tendencies). Not rooting for one of them doesn't mean I'm rooting against either of them, or that I don't acknowledge the things they do well or poorly.
I legitimately thought you were talking about Nintendo hardware there for a while.
As far as we can tell the Switch 2 seems like it's a bit ahead of the Deck, which is on the low end of the current batch of PC handhelds anyway. I don't think the quality of hardware is the differentiating factor here, one way or the other. I also don't think "anemic" was what the Switch felt like at launch. It was somewhere between the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One, which was only slightly inadequate for a home console and incredibly bulky for a handheld in 2017. "Not pushing any interesting boundary" is somewhere between extremely opinionated and outright incorrect, quite frankly.
I have to say, it's a bit surprising to see all the hostility from... I don't know who this is. PC master race bros? Steam fanboys? You'd think that last group at least would have some fondness for the Switch, given it effectively invented the entire segment of modern hybrid handhelds. Not that I have a horse in that race, there are pros and cons of both, I own both and I think both are pretty great. The Deck effectively replaced the Switch on my rotation, then it got replaced by a Windows handheld and I assume the mix will lean slightly more towards the console end when then Switch 2 comes out, then swing back when newer PC handhelds come out. I am fine with that.
I find the last point interesting, though. What IS a "cultivated garden" platform? I don't know that I think of Steam in those terms at all. Steam is a software platform that just happens to be tied to someone else's hardware and OS and seems very unhappy about it. From the perspective of a PC user I think Steam's dominance is a problem. For one thing because my storefront of choice is GOG (screw DRM, thanks) and for another because the entire point of an open platform is competition. From the perspective of a console user Steam is... well, not that. It's a PC gaming thing, so I don't see it as direct competition in the fist place. Which I guess is why I'm more weirded out than anything else to see people taking sides this aggressively.
I will acknowledge that when it's tested in court. And I mean internationally.
The notion that copyright is absolute as long as the content is hidden behind any and all DRM is nonsensical, as is the assumption that literally any function not enabled to the user on purpose is illegal to use. I suspect the reason nobody has had to really defend that softmodding their console and dumping their owned keys and carts is legal is that no game maker, Nintendo included, wants to see how that goes in any way that would set a precedent.
I never disputed this, but you are arguing that PC games are all shit for some reason or another unless they're ported either from or to PS5.
Wait, that's what you think you're arguing against?
No wonder this conversation is so loopy, then.
The fact that consoles are a huge asset for PC gaming doesn't mean, and is nowhere near the same as, saying that "PC games are shit unless ported directly from the PS5". Your straw man is not just subtly misrepresenting my point, it's having some entirely unrelated conversation in a different room with a different person.
Consoles get to be a massive asset for PC games without... well, whatever that statement is supposed to imply. PC games benefit a LOT from having a set target for mainstream hardware be a fixed point for five to ten years. They benefitted strongly from access to a large volume of affordable, standardized, compatible controllers (these days things have been that way long enough that the standards aren't going anywhere, but it was a massive deal in 2005, which is the period we're talking about, despite your surprise that we're talking about it). And yes, the target for PC-only gaming today would be both different and significantly less pleasant without those things. The shift to a more PC-centric market already made it so that ten-year-old games dominate the landscape.
It's not just CounterStrike. It's Fortnite, Overwatch, GTA 5, Minecraft, Roblox. PC gaming's characteristics encourage those types of forever games targeting widely accessible hardware. Consoles existing in parallel open the door to additional viability for AAA releases targeting higher end specs. Not that you wouldn't get any of those without consoles, but for the past 20 years consoles have been a big reason that's a whole genre instead a one-in-a-generation thing you'd get when an engine company wanted to flex its tech muscle for potential engine licensors and accidentally made a game in the process.
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.
You are all over the place here. I'm not doing quotes, either, it's an obnoxious way to argue online.
In no particular order: No, it's not just developing countries on older hardware (although there ARE significant markets where high end hardware is less popular, and they matter). Microsoft doesn't own Windows, Valve owns Windows, at least on gaming, as evidenced by the long string of failed attempts from Microsoft to establish their own store on Windows PCs. The standard controller was part of that, but it wasn't all of it. And yes, most of the 14000 titles on PC are tiny indies that sold next to zero (or actually zero) copies.
Valve runs steam as a gig economy app, there are very few guardrails and instead very strong algorithmic discoverability management tools. Steam has shovelware for the same reason Google Play has shovelware, Steam is just WAY better at surfacing things specifically to gamers.
Incidentally, most of these new games support controllers because the newly standardized Xinput just works. Valve has a whole extra controller translation layer because everything else kinda doesn't and they wanted full compatibility, not just Xbox compatibility because the blood feud between Gaben and Microsoft will never end, I suppose. None of that changes that it was the advent of XInput and Xbox 360 controller compatibility that unlocked direct ports, along with consoles gradually becoming standardized PCs.