Nintendo Switch

[FFNut]

Honestly I love Nintendo, all they release is usually great but it does come with a age limit. They almost have focused on young children. Wish they would make some more age appropriate titles as well. Also it would be nice if they tried to compete with Sony and Microsoft. It was almost like they rolled over after the GameCube lost out to the XBox and PS1.

They used to to be giants for trouts sake.

[Del Murder]

The Switch is not competing against the PS4/Xbox One of 2013. They are competing against the PS4/Xbox One of 2017. The Switch's high price and lack of games compared to the other systems which are cheaper, more powerful and have robust lineups make it a hard sell.

That is all true, but there are also people who will pay a lot of money for any Nintendo system once it comes out. The launch price is probably on the cheap side for them.

Nintendo has the very difficult job of pricing the system to compete with current console prices while at the same time getting as much money as possible from their die-hard fans (of which there are still many). The only direction the price can go is down. They have to weigh the risk of losing out on sales to people who will never buy the system if it is not at a reasonable launch price with the risk of losing revenue by selling it too cheaply to customers who would gladly pay more. Sometimes, companies get around this with 'special edition' bundles and other high-profit extras to mark things up for the most dedicated fans. That's probably easier to do with a game than a console, though.

All things considered, I think their price point is very reasonable from a business standpoint. It will of course not be each individual's reasonable price, but at least you can console (no pun intended) yourself with the fact that, eventually, the price will lowered to the the point you are willing to buy it if you ever wanted it to begin with.

[Mirage]

What even is a deluxe Mario Kart game?

It's just MK8 with some modifications. Calling it a port wouldn't be very inaccurate.

[Slothy]

Well you guys convinced me. I'm headed to Nintendo's HQ as we speak to burn the building down.

I don't recall telling you to do that.

I'm not going to stop you of course. I enjoy a little arson as much as the next guy. I just did not encourage you to do this and you will not tell the authorities otherwise.

[Skyblade]

Solid analysis here, I think.

[NeoCracker]

Guys the Switch is getting a Story of Seasons game.

http://nichegamer.com/2017/01/14/sto...ntendo-switch/

Things are starting to look up.

[Skyblade]

GameXplain does a Q&A on the Switch after attending the demo event (unfortunately a lot of repeated questions, but they have a lot of good info in there):

And ProJared gives his thoughts after playing with it as well:

[Mirage]

I was just made aware that the "grip" for the joycons to turn them into a more conventional controller doesn't have a usb plug to let you charge the controllers while they are connected to it. You have to take them out of the grip and put them into the Switch unit to charge them, then take them off and put them back into the grip when you want to resume playing later. Unless of course you pay another 30 bucks for a "charging stand" for the joy cons.

Additionally, going digital on the Switch is going to be just as difficult as on the WiiU. Breath of the Wild alone takes up nearly half of the console's internal storage, and no doubt the system's OS uses a bit too. The console supports Micro SD cards for storage expansion, so if you want a console with reasonable storage space, you'll have to add another 40-50 bucks for a high-speed micro SD card. However, SD cards, while starting to get reasonable sequential reads and write speeds, still lag horribly behind in random access IOPS. In other words, if you install your games to a SD card, they're gonna load slower than they do on the internal storage.

[Slothy]

Let's not forget that SD cards don't last very long if you're using them as much as you would playing a game off of them. Probably have to buy more than one over it's life and have fun when they start to degrade and corrupt game or save files.

[Del Murder]

Yeah, the way Nintendo has handled the Switch accessories is mind-bogglingly dumb so far.

Has any console truly found a solution to going digital? Isn't space an issue on all the consoles?

[Mirage]

The PS4 comes with 500 GB on the cheapest models, and supports replacing the entire drive with a bigger drive if you need more. 500 GB is already over ten times the Switch's storage space, and a replacement HDD for the PS4 would be just as reliable and fast as the original. Additionally, you could sell the old drive or use it in another device if you want.

I've yet to run out of space on my PS4, but I don't have the largest selection of games either. I think I have 150 GB left, after picking up a dozen PS+ handouts, 5 PS2 games (around 3-4 GB each) and 5 "triple a" PS4 games.

-edit-
nah, i actually have 10 PS4 games, one of them is even the last of us, which clocks in at 50 GB alone. 107 GB free.

[Slothy]

Seriously, when you can put any hard drive you want in a console space is no more limited than it would be in my computer as an example. Assuming 20GB per game (probably at the upper end of games that Nintendo will put out), you'd get 25 games on a drive at once. Stick a 1TB drive or larger in there and most people probably won't even buy enough games during the consoles life time to fill it.

[Mirage]

You can't put a regular HDD in the Switch, though. It would consume too much power, take too much space and also break too easily due to the portability of the platform. However, 64 GB would have been doable.

Alternatively, the dock could have been smarter, and given us an e-SATA port, or even a USB3 port. It doesn't, though.

[Slothy]

Yeah I'm not actually saying the switch should have a hard drive, just that space isn't a massive issue on other systems and comparing to the switch solely for the sake of demonstrating how useless their internal storage is compared to others.

The switch clearly couldn't have a mechanical drive when portable, though I agree that something like an e-sata port in the dock, combined with a mechanical hard drive could have been cool actually. Let people back up the games they aren't planning to use on the go to that and leave the mobile stuff on the device itself.

[Mirage]

heck, maybe the dock could have had a 2.5" hdd slot in it. but that's probably going to be less user friendly than just supporting an external drive, even if it would look nicer.

considering the dock on its own costs like 70 bucks, is it really too much to ask for?