Well the NES and SNES were a different bag. In those gens, Nintendo had a good, affordable console with a solid library of games. Back then, that alone was revolutionary, so they essentially created the market out of thin air and then reaped those benefits. I guess the Switch is the same in the sense that Nintendo struck when the iron was hottest - 2017 was the perfect time to make and release a handheld/TV hybrid console. The tech was just strong enough and just affordable enough to make the concept work, but there weren’t really any competitors yet. Fast forward to 2024 and now we have the Steam Deck and all of its copycats eating that lunch a little, but when the Switch came out, there was nothing else quite like it.
when i have my non-tech savvy friends over, i don’t want to make them sit there for 5 minutes while i try to connect all the controllers, and then make sure the game in question recognizes them all and isn’t trying to map all controllers to one input or something. Maybe it’s gotten better in the time since I last tried, but my experience has not been “2 minutes to run the mapper”. On the Switch, you just press a button on each controller and you’re rolling.
for a while there, it was actually better to play Switch games on PC with an emulator than it was to play it on the actual Switch. BOTW and TOTK were gorgeous in 1440p 60fps, wish all gamers got to experience that.
tbh i might just be inclined to view older peripherals as controllers? Which isn’t exactly clear and logical. Idk, i guess the counter to that is that I would consider Guitar Hero guitars “peripherals” rather than “controllers”, so you maybe it is a “general” vs “specific” thing. Except a lot of these controllers we’re talking about were only officially supported by like, 5 games at most. So i’m back to not knowing the difference haha.
DS4? As in the one for the PS4? It’s a bit of an unfair comparison bc they are different gens, but i would definitely argue that the current Xbox Series controllers are higher build-quality than the DS4. My Xbox One controller had creaky, rattly shoulders and an okay but not great d-pad. The newer ones fix that, fortunately.
All that said, I will not dispute that it’s probably less ideal for smaller hands. Sony has always gotten that part right.
the orb! The Orb was the number one controller i had in mind when making this post. I never had one but i’ve watched so many videos about it. It’s like a controller from an alternate timeline of what could have been, if we never moved to analog sticks or mouse look. Apparently the tech is still preferred in the 3D CAD space. After several acquisitions, the company is now a Logitech subsidiary called “3Dconnexion”, and they make CAD tools like the SpaceMouse that use the same 6-axis tech that the SpaceOrb used:
Hitboxes are something else. I understand why they are ideal, but it’s so funny to see years of ergonomic evolution compressed down to a box with a bunch of buttons on it, for more precision. Lol.