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It’s official: No Nintendo console has lasted as long as Switch without being replaced | VGC
(www.videogameschronicle.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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i know conventional gamer wisdom says otherwise but i think this just goes to show how more horsepower just leads to diminishing returns at this point. people call the switch underpowered but it's best selling game is a wii u port! gone are the days of each generation looking infinitely better than the last
Design > Specs
Eh, I think this is more indicative of the power of Nintendo IPs. My wife has been playing a lot of Pokemon Scarlett lately and it visibly struggles and has crashed or frozen at least a couple of times. This isn't the only switch game to do this either (none of them ports too).
People are just willing to put up with a lot of jank in order to play Nintendo games. If Nintendo didn't have such strong titles and only released those titles on Nintendo hardware, the switch hardware probably would've failed. The winning move was to heavily invest in strong games and then lock those games into their walled garden.
Nintendo got ripped apart for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet.
They still sold like hotcakes though
Its sales have probably dropped off so it may not beat Sword and Shield but 25 million is nothing to sniff at.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Nintendo_Switch_video_games
Pokémon games aren't developed by Nintendo.
Bad performance isn't always caused by lack of resources. It's more often bad optimisation / resource management.
Even Zelda is stuttering. Or Mario Kart 8 when you play with multiple people.
Not everything can be saved by optimization. Even if it could, throwing more horsepower at the game is cheaper than having every game-developer write assembly code. Switch hardware is tragically slow and it shows in 3d games even with optimization.
Optimisation has its limits, yes. The difference is that Nintendo is satisfied with targeting 30fps for a lot of games, and not caring as much about framedrops as long as the core gameplay is solid and works relatively bug-free.
They spent 12 months optimising Tears of the Kingdom, and it still has areas where there are slowdowns. It was not unfixable, they just decided it was good enough.
Its hard to compare games directly as each has their own constraints and dependencies. BotW for example was also released on Wii U, and that was a limiting factor. I don't remember stuttering in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, but they did make it run at 30fps when playing with 3-4 players, if you mean that?
I think a more egregious example would be Hyrule Warriors in co-op, but again this is Koei Tecmo and not in-housed developed so they didn't have access to the same resources and tricks that Nintendo has.
They could have spent 12 months getting those 10-20fps moments smoothened out, but it was probably not worth the investment as 99% of players don't care or don't even notice when a game slows down a bit.
It's an exclusive to Nintendo hardware. They only make these games for switch. If you want to play Pokemon, you have to buy a switch. My point was that people love games like Pokemon so much that they're more than willing to buy sub standard hardware to play it, even when the experience of playing is obviously hindered by that hardware. The IP overcomes any negatives from the poor console hardware.
If The Pokémon Company decided to put some polish into those games instead of pumping out 3 within 15 months, I'm pretty sure most performance issues could have been solved or alleviated.
In the same vein, better hardware would not have automatically meant that the game would run without such issues.
I mean they could. But just as Nintendo doesn't need to offer better hardware due to how much people want to play their games, Pokemon doesn't need to do better optimization because people play them anyway. It's honestly unlikely that a better optimized game would have significantly affected their sales numbers.
I play switch just because it's fun. It's portable, got the cute little remotes. Have no interest in Nintendo games.
I play Switch because its version of DOAX3 is uncensored
Lmao had no idea. Switch weirdly seems to have alot of hentai games too.
This was already established with the PSP vs 3DS.
This was already established with the gameboy vs... everything else.
Ancient hardware. Complete market dominance.
Turns out battery life is incredibly important in the handeld market.
The switch does struggle running higher resolution graphics; I can emulate BotW/TotK to look much better on PC simply due to having access to a stronger GPU.
4k gaming on PCs is still hard to accomplish without a high end machine, so I still think we will be seeing improvements with generations; at least until 4k gaming can be done on mid level hardware.
But you don't need 4k resolution to have a great game. That's what OP is getting at. When making a game for beefier hardware, you can use the better graphics as a crutch instead of focusing on better gameplay and story.
Thats why SNES rpgs stories were so great. And the rpgs today are just long winded slogs.
Data limits forced writers to cut the fat out of their scripts for the games, and get to the point.
I don't need 35 hours to say "thats the bad guy".
Lol don’t stress they are literally talking about 4k on a 720p handheld, clearly brain damaged.
I was gonna mention that. The Switch is first and foremost a handheld device. You'd get no benefit from squeezing 4k onto a 7" display. The only thing it would do is decrease the battery life, which would be made even worse with a more powerful GPU.
I understand, I have a deck hd screen and I don't believe it would matter. I don’t know why so many downvotes on an objectively factual statement, like a retina display at 7 inches isn’t 4k, and idk who would seriously hookup a steamdeck to a 4k display where it obviously would never keep up at native. Literally only an idiot would downvote me, but here we are on social media.
i see comparisons of switch games on hardware and in emulators all the time and can never tell the difference, and same for all these recent 4k remasters. i am glad that there are options for people who can tell and do care but it's nowhere near as noticable to your average joe compared to the jump from snes to n64 or n64 to gamecube. or perhaps i am just a spectacularly below average joe haha