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StarTopic Future Nintendo Hardware & Technology Speculation & Discussion |ST| (Read the staff posts before commenting!)

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Kind of seems like Reggie's book just sort of confirms a lot of the rumors/fan theories about NCL, and the decision making there during the Iwata years. I mean he may be making himself look better in all of that, but it really tracks that the brain trust in Japan was making a lot of decisions internally, and was often oblivious to much of what was going on outside their bubble.
 
Look over there said:
...aww, shit, ARM revamped their pages for each uarch. It was last year or the year before, when I think that you could've seen the improvement claims for at least some of ARM11 to A8 then to A9 then to A15 then to A57. And I can't find them on the wayback machine.

Let's see what I can wrangle up...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/8718/the-samsung-galaxy-note-4-exynos-review/6 - at least +20% going from A15 to A57

https://www.itproportal.com/2011/03/14/exclusive-arm-cortex-a15-40-cent-faster-cortex-a9/ - "We've received an email from ARM that confirms that the Cortex-A15 will be at least 40 per cent faster than the A9 when it comes to raw performance (Dhrystone MIPS), all things equal; same number of core, same speed.
The Cortex-A8 reached 2.0 DMIPS/MHz while the Cortex-A9 reached 2.5 DMIPS/MHz, a 25 per cent improvement."

https://www.anandtech.com/show/2798/5 - "At the same clock speed and with the same L2 cache sizes, ARM shows the Cortex A8 as being able to execute 40% more instructions per second than the ARM11."

Ehh, inconsistent sourcing and metrics used, so I don't really like it. Still, if you want to ballpark it, ARM11 to A57 probably doesn't land all that far from A57 to A78.
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Crusters said:
Armv6 isn't really available much though. No one cares? Literally it's only product was arm11.....I know it used VFPv2 and Did Not have Neon though...


Wikipedia actually has some useful information someone usefully graphed:

ARMv7_vs_ARMv8_Performance_.png

It provides Integer performance, in dhrystones per MHZ. And we know the clocks of the systems as they were used in these products, so it's pretty straightforward.

Also a bunch of CPU bench marks on products using the A57 and A9.

ARM Cortex-A57 vs ARM Cortex-A9 - GadgetVersus

Comparison between ARM Cortex-A57 and ARM Cortex-A9 with the specifications of the processors, the number of cores, threads, cache memory, also the performance in benchmark platforms such as Geekbench, Passmark, Cinebench or AnTuTu.
gadgetversus.com gadgetversus.com

Youll have to do some mental compensation, as none of these A57/a9 products are the switch or vita. I think the shield TV is in there lol.

Nothing with an a9 benched here gets low enough to be comp as table to the vitas 333 Mhz.

But regardless, the comparison is so incredibly one sided, you don't really need to get into the details.
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Thanks to both of you! Gives me a rough idea of how much of an improvement it is.
 
more non-graphical usecases for RT. Digital Foundry talked about this earlier this week about how Psychonauts 2 could have used RT for their portals conundrum. that use case is shown in this demonstration

 
ILikeFeet said:
I think it was always coming. they couldn't not support it given the hardware. depending on the timeline, he might have made a more concerted effort in getting UE4/Unity devs to work on the engine sooner than later
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Great thoughts yeah maybe that’s more where his efforts were. And good point about NVIDIA, yeah of course they weren’t gonna overlook that
 
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ReddDreadtheLead said:
Thanks to both of you! Gives me a rough idea of how much of an improvement it is.
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One more thing that might be pertinent.

A9 only had a 64 bit pipeline for neon, so it could only be used every other clock, it was 4 words wide, and took 2 clocks for results, like multiply on one, add on the other, result for multi, result for add.

A57 had double 64 bit pipelines, and could send both through at the same time for, or cram it all in on a 128 bit register (labeled q something, I think for quadruple....)
 
My Tulpa said:
I understand porting is about optimization and recoding to new architecture in finding shortcuts.

Is 6-12 months to port a huge AAA to a different platform that crazy? I thought that was pretty usual.

Of course there are extra hurdles publishers/devs have to get around to get their “pc multiplat” game optimized and running on Switch than ps4/one…but publishers are known to jump those hurdles if they think the demand on the platform is there (see ps3 PowerPC to cell hurdles devs were willing to deal with)

If you are telling me Drake hardware would have taken significantly less time/less costs to get Witcher 3 developed for and released and maintained with continued support…ok, but I don’t really think the cost savings to CDPR would be that significant.

Ubisoft devs spent a year making the ps360 Assassins Creed 3 game run decently on the Wii U, for example.



It’s still going to be one more thing a publisher has to spend time and resources to develop for.

It’s always going to come down to if the extra costs and diverting of resources is worth it.

We are talking about big multiplat games that are already spread thin, suffering crunch, having to delay main platforms versions, pushing pc versions till later etc etc.

These big multiplats will always focus on just the platforms where their market potential is the biggest. The platforms that are extremely questionable will get some focus much later, if any.
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It's pretty abnormal for ports of these big multiplatform games to be treated as such a distinct project. That tends to only happen for platforms like the Switch, which require large amounts of bespoke work because they are significantly weaker than what the game was designed around or other weird factors (like Wii U Gamepad support).

You mention PS3, but this isn't really a PS3 situation. The PS3 took a bunch of extra work to extract good performance on, but it could broadly handle anything that came to 360 with some fairly minor sacrifices. The Switch, on the other hand, is often significantly below the minimum requirements PS4/X1 games are built to work with. The downgrades required are much heavier, and tend to include areas where it often is quite difficult to scale games down. When you see a game release on everything except Switch, it's much more likely that power is the primary reason and not business concerns.
 
Pokemaniac said:
It's pretty abnormal for ports of these big multiplatform games to be treated as such a distinct project. That tends to only happen for platforms like the Switch, which require large amounts of bespoke work because they are significantly weaker than what the game was designed around or other weird factors (like Wii U Gamepad support).

You mention PS3, but this isn't really a PS3 situation. The PS3 took a bunch of extra work to extract good performance on, but it could broadly handle anything that came to 360 with some fairly minor sacrifices. The Switch, on the other hand, is often significantly below the minimum requirements PS4/X1 games are built to work with. The downgrades required are much heavier, and tend to include areas where it often is quite difficult to scale games down. When you see a game release on everything except Switch, it's much more likely that power is the primary reason and not business concerns.
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He once told me porting Resident Evil 5 to Switch was no different to porting Witcher 3 to Switch in terms of time and expenditure.
 
I was watching Gaming Historian's excellent Super Mario World doc and a point come up that I thought was important. Excuse me if I'm wrong here, but NES was selling really well when the SNES was on the horizon. PC Engine and Sega were already touting 16 bit while NES was still going. Nintendo refused to comment on their SNES plans. History likes to repeat itself. I see PC Engine and Sega like Sony and MS.

The big factor that led Nintendo to release the SNES was market saturation. NES had like 87% of the market. I'm wondering if Switch is getting to that point? Don't enough people have the console so that it might slow sales? Just wondering because it might highlight that a new system is on the horizon. Also, there was a chip shortage around the time of the SNES launch. Also, the USA was in a recession too when SNES hit shelves. Crazy how things are so similar.

tl;dr-Switch's success may begin to wane soon because of market saturation (everyone has one) and it might be a better indicator of a successor soon than any competition. Also, SNES launched in the USA during a recession and soon after a chip shortage in 1991. I think we're more likely going to see a successor with similar branding!
 
With how long the Switch Pro has been rumored I could see this new revision being the last one for like 4 to 5 years especially with how expensive it could be for consumers. We are looking at a 400+ dollar device here.
 
A funny anecdote I've heard about the SNES days (I wouldn't know firsthand, I didn't exist yet) was that kids were having trouble convincing their parents to buy a Super Nintendo because they already had "a Nintendo" and "what's the difference?" and "what are bits anyway?" etc.

Meanwhile I think it's more palatable for a household to have multiple Switches, a family could have 2-3 to share and they could swap in and out of the dock anytime. Switch Ultra would be the premium model for the living room, the OG/Lite as a holiday present for a young child, and so on, all sharing the same game library.
 
I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo added a plan to the expansion pak that focused on upgrading older switch games to take advantage of newer hardware as a way to attract and retain more subscribers. I feel like it will work especially if they are able to get third parties to go back and upgrade their games as well, at least for the titles that could really use it. It will also be a great way for them to market the upgrades on a consistent basis and give older titles another chance to sell.
 
Mr.Gamerson said:
I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo added a plan to the expansion pak that focused on upgrading older switch games to take advantage of newer hardware as a way to attract and retain more subscribers. I feel like it will work especially if they are able to get third parties to go back and upgrade their games as well, at least for the titles that could really use it. It will also be a great way for them to market the upgrades on a consistent basis and give older titles another chance to sell.
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Oh god this is a terrible, terrible idea.
 
Mr.Gamerson said:
I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo added a plan to the expansion pak that focused on upgrading older switch games to take advantage of newer hardware as a way to attract and retain more subscribers. I feel like it will work especially if they are able to get third parties to go back and upgrade their games as well, at least for the titles that could really use it. It will also be a great way for them to market the upgrades on a consistent basis and give older titles another chance to sell.
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I mean it wouldn’t give me a reason to purchase tbh…
 
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Crusters said:
One more thing that might be pertinent.

A9 only had a 64 bit pipeline for neon, so it could only be used every other clock, it was 4 words wide, and took 2 clocks for results, like multiply on one, add on the other, result for multi, result for add.

A57 had double 64 bit pipelines, and could send both through at the same time for, or cram it all in on a 128 bit register (labeled q something, I think for quadruple....)
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It also seems that for the A9, the NEON unit was... optional? Partners could pick between either a NEON unit or FPU?

Speaking of SIMD/FP throughput, the A76 doubled it to 2x128 bit, and the A78 should inherit that.
 
Mr.Gamerson said:
I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo added a plan to the expansion pak that focused on upgrading older switch games to take advantage of newer hardware as a way to attract and retain more subscribers. I feel like it will work especially if they are able to get third parties to go back and upgrade their games as well, at least for the titles that could really use it. It will also be a great way for them to market the upgrades on a consistent basis and give older titles another chance to sell.
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That would only make the barrier of entry for the new console even higher, which is already something Nintendo will have trouble with.
 
I don't expect any paid patches. largely because I don't expect many patches to begin with outside of leggy sellers with no sequel on the horizon
 
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Look over there said:
It also seems that for the A9, the NEON unit was... optional? Partners could pick between either a NEON unit or FPU?

Speaking of SIMD/FP throughput, the A76 doubled it to 2x128 bit, and the A78 should inherit that.
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That sounds familiar. Which is usually a good sign with the way my memory works.

The a9 should have had VFPv3 and the Neon on top of it, which I think was the FPU. Just using the newer chonkier VFPv3 would have given it superior performance to the arm11 Multicore's VFPv2, and then it had the neon on top of it. Iirc correctly the thing about neon back then, was even though you could only use it's arithmetic every other cycle it could do 4 flops a pop. I don't think that core part of vfp+Neon has changed all that much, the concept was to just keep getting wider for max bonus multiplier high score.
 
BobNintendofan said:
I expect Nintendo to announce new video games when they plan to sell a huge revision.
Like I said, the OLED was marketed with Metroid Dread and Mario Party Superstars and the drake, if it is a pro, would be much bigger than the OLED.
But they're not announcing jack and shit right now.

Almost like there isn't a pro coming early next year.
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Both of those games were announced after the OLED model was announced?

By this logic, where a Pro needs a much bigger wave of titles to sell its appeal, wouldn't you expect a weird drought in game announcements prior to the reveal? Maybe take your traditional midyear announcement about H2 titles, remove all first party titles from the list and transition your marketing to be around already announced tentpoles? Perhaps if you were going to have a long cross-gen period, you'd build a year around squeezing all the games in your backlog that were not set for cross-gen support, several of which were rumored completed for some time prior to announcement, leading to an unusually stacked year?

But the way, I'm not saying that's what's happened. I'm saying the current state of game announcements can be spun to support either narrative. If the pitch of the device is "plays your existing games, better" Nintendo could very easily have 0 new games at launch, instead building the launch entirely around upgraded visuals of Big Games in the library - that would have the advantage of not confusing casual consumers who might believe those new titles were Pro exclusives.

This was basically the Switch launch - "Play a couple indie titles and BotW on the go!" The salivating for years over a speculated/rumored pro was almost always "man I'd love to play game X at stable HD resolutions! Y would be so good with a stable frame rate." I think that demonstrates there is a market for the device that doesn't require new games.

Dread was a remarkable piece of synergy with the OLED, and helped make the pitch clear. I'm dubious about the idea that Dread sold OLEDs itself, or that the OLED pushed Dread sales (though I could be wrong).
 
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Mr.Gamerson said:
I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo added a plan to the expansion pak that focused on upgrading older switch games to take advantage of newer hardware as a way to attract and retain more subscribers. I feel like it will work especially if they are able to get third parties to go back and upgrade their games as well, at least for the titles that could really use it. It will also be a great way for them to market the upgrades on a consistent basis and give older titles another chance to sell.
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This would be a great business move, even if they tied it in with just the basic NSO account for 1st party games.
 
The OLED model was announced with footage of people pretending they were playing The Sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Splatoon 3, among others. So by rights, a new system shouldn't be announced until after those games have come out.
 
Stinky Horse said:
The OLED model was announced with footage of people pretending they were playing The Sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Splatoon 3, among others. So by rights, a new system shouldn't be announced until after those games have come out.
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The Wii U was shown with footage of people (pretending they were) playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, among others. So by rights, a new system shouldn't be announced until after those games have come out.

The 3DS was shown with footage of people (pretending they were) playing Super Smash Bros. For Nintendo 3DS, among others. So by rights, a new system revision shouldn't be announced until after those games have come out.

The Xbox One was shown with footage of people (pretending they were) playing Halo Infinite, among others. So by rights, a new system shouldn't be announced until after those games have come out.

🤔
 
I think the best way to summarize the Drake situation is that none of upcoming Nintendo products or marketing Nintendo has done of them, affects the possible Drake release date. This both means we can’t use it as a pattern against or in favor of it releasing late 22/early 23.
 
Pokemaniac said:
Power certainly isn't the only factor causing games to skip Switch (see: KH1 and KH2 cloud editions), but in an industry heavily oriented around PS4/X1 development, it's a very big factor. A new Switch that can not only eliminate the PS4/X1 gap, but potentially even get within a stone's throw of Xbox Series S would do a lot to improve third party support.
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This needs to be repeated and repeated until some people understand that this is the current state of play in the video game industry in 2022.

A lot of Nintendo fans have this victim complex that the big bad third parties hate Nintendo because of the 90’s or don’t believe they can compete with their first party titles when the truth of the matter is this… If Nintendo have hardware and online infrastructure parity with Playstation and Xbox then they will get the exact same third party published games as those systems in 95% of cases. Third parties want as big an audience as possible for their games as long as the hardware can run their vision of the experience.

Drake (mainly because of DLSS) should mean it gets more ports than the current Switch but I honestly see a similar situation as this generation regarding third party ports once games start to be designed around 8 core / 16 threaded desktop class CPU’s and SSD’s especially once developers inevitably start to target 30fps again to squeeze all the visual juice they can from PS5 and the Series consoles.

Now Nintendo could go with maximum cuda cores to hit 3tflops on the GPU, an 8 core CPU clocked as high as possible, 16GB RAM and a 128GB SSD to secure a ton more third party ports. But will they? I don’t think there’s even a small chance of that when they can do 2tflops, 4 core CPU, 8GB RAM and no SSD and make an extra $50 profit from launch, have an extra hour of battery life, a much cooler console with less materials for cooling along with the above specs giving their first party teams the biggest visual leap since the Wii to Wii U generation.

In short Nintendo will never get full third party port parity unless they made a dedicated console again which was in the ballpark of the competition and that ain’t going to happen after the success of the Switch hybrid USP.
 
Vash_the_Stampede said:
This would be a great business move, even if they tied it in with just the basic NSO account for 1st party games.
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The patches don't have to be simple resolution boosts and framerate improvements as well. They could make some of the upgrades more extensive with raytracing editions, texture resolution, hdr etc. Also, third parties could always go back and upgrade their games for free (I don't expect them to unless incentivized).

I just don't expect Nintendo go back and update all of these games without making us pay for it somehow. In my mind, you would be able to sign up for the expansion pak and get the patch upgrade and still be able to keep it after your subscription ends. Though you would have to sign back up for the expansion pak if for some reason you needed to redownload the patch. I would prefer this money grab than the potential of them re-releasing games again for the next system at full price just so you can play them in 4K like I think they are planning lol.

I expect most of the launch window users will likely be core Nintendo fans who are more likely to have the expansion pak so to them this upgrade will seem "free", and so the backlash won't be as bad because it will seem like a bonus to a service they already have.

I also think Nintendo is going to add more notable stuff to the NSO+Expansion Pak around the launch of the new system to help get people to try the service for the first time and hopefully stay subscribed. Like more virtual console systems, more dlc, free games (first party, third party, and indie games), game discounts, etc.
 
Pokemaniac said:
You seem to be under a misunderstanding that games are rebuilt from scratch for every platform they release on. That hasn't been really been true since the 90s. The fact that it required a dedicated team a year to port The Witcher 3 to Switch is an exceptionally high amount of time and development resources for a modern multiplatform game. Most of the cost in "impossible ports" to Switch is not in building new things, but optimizing and paring back what's already there so that it can run with something resembling reasonable performance on the much weaker hardware of the Switch.

Power certainly isn't the only factor causing games to skip Switch (see: KH1 and KH2 cloud editions), but in an industry heavily oriented around PS4/X1 development, it's a very big factor. A new Switch that can not only eliminate the PS4/X1 gap, but potentially even get within a stone's throw of Xbox Series S would do a lot to improve third party support.
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Polygon said:
This needs to be repeated and repeated until some people understand that this is the current state of play in the video game industry in 2022.

A lot of Nintendo fans have this victim complex that the big bad third parties hate Nintendo because of the 90’s or don’t believe they can compete with their first party titles when the truth of the matter is this… If Nintendo have hardware and online infrastructure parity with Playstation and Xbox then they will get the exact same third party published games as those systems in 95% of cases. Third parties want as big an audience as possible for their games as long as the hardware can run their vision of the experience.

Drake (mainly because of DLSS) should mean it gets more ports than the current Switch but I honestly see a similar situation as this generation regarding third party ports once games start to be designed around 8 core / 16 threaded desktop class CPU’s and SSD’s especially once developers inevitably start to target 30fps again to squeeze all the visual juice they can from PS5 and the Series consoles.

Now Nintendo could go with maximum cuda cores to hit 3tflops on the GPU, an 8 core CPU clocked as high as possible, 16GB RAM and a 128GB SSD to secure a ton more third party ports. But will they? I don’t think there’s even a small chance of that when they can do 2tflops, 4 core CPU, 8GB RAM and no SSD and make an extra $50 profit from launch, have an extra hour of battery life, a much cooler console with less materials for cooling along with the above specs giving their first party teams the biggest visual leap since the Wii to Wii U generation.

In short Nintendo will never get full third party port parity unless they made a dedicated console again which was in the ballpark of the competition and that ain’t going to happen after the success of the Switch hybrid USP.
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Said this a few times already, but I think Series S existing is very interesting because it provides the sufficient lower bound Switch needs to hit for most games (realitically, low end PC is the true lower bound given how so many multiplats target the PC as well). If the new Switch is anywhere near as powerful as we think it could be, even lower end of the power scale would be enough. Granted it could also come in much more powerful. It would have to be a huge shock like all the leaked information being false or consistently not telling the true picture of their next console for it to become a Wii U like device in terms of power gap with the competitors.

As for parity, I get really tired of the discussion even discussing it within the Nintendo community as there are some people with PTSD over Nintendo's 'loss' post SNES and some people just think Nintendo needs to be l ike when they were growing up, which was when they had anywhere between 60-90% of the global market. That's not going to happen again, even Sony can't get back to their highs with the PS1/2

All Nintendo needs is to capture enough of the support, and arguably more is better. Less bespoke work is better etc. But arguing in the margins over this franchise or that franchise not coming to Nintendo is tiring, and defeatist. I don't mind not having certain games, as I know Nintendo will make sure other platforms won't have certain other games either. Remember the Sega/Nintendo console wars when the consoles were highly differentiated? That wasn't such a bad thing.

At the end of the day we still don't have a hardware to talk about, because it's not announced and we don't know the near final specs. So anything we say is speculative. I can type an essay based on imaginary 'expected' specs that will be meaningless if the final specced hardware package comes in above or below that and the marketing is agressive to the point where several games that skipped the Switch will finally launch on it. That's why I just want them to announce the thing and see how they are positioning it with their vision trailer. Just like how a lot of NX talk became worthless after the trailer dropped. At that point, that's where we can really talk about how things may pan out.
 
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ReddDreadtheLead said:
Boy do I have a bridge to sell you if you think it’s that easy.
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Whatever. I’ve talked to several developers who have daily interactions with project management and marketing personnel of several huge publishers. No one hates Nintendo. Publishers want to release their games on as many capable platforms as possible.

Funny how Steam Deck is getting specialist third party patches with a potential install base of only a few million. That’s because it can handle PS4/XBO games at 720p/30fps and thus has the potential to generate more ROI on existing software. Switch would be the same… if it were capable.

You will see an absolute avalanche of PS4/XBO ports once Drake is out. PS5/Series exclusive ports will be a different story just like this gen.
 
Polygon said:
Whatever. I’ve talked to several developers who have daily interactions with project management and marketing personnel of several huge publishers. No one hates Nintendo. Publishers want to release their games on as many capable platforms as possible.

Funny how Steam Deck is getting specialist third party patches with a potential install base of only a few million. That’s because it can handle PS4/XBO games at 720p/30fps and thus has the potential to generate more ROI on existing software. Switch would be the same… if it were capable.
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Who’s talking anything about hating? You and a few others are the ones who are pushing that narrative. Even when explicitly told it is for business & ideological reasons you’ll shove that into people’s mouths.

It’s great that you talk to developers and marketing personnel. Yeah 3rd parties wanna release on as many platforms. I’ll believe it when I see it when it comes to releasing on Nintendo platforms. It has gotten better but if all it took was sufficient power then again this should have been solved ages ago. Don’t be surprised when we go through developer/publisher bingo about why they aren’t releasing on the Drake. Or why Nintendo still doesn’t match up with them business or ideological wise.
 
Tentacle-tropes said:
Who’s talking anything about hating? You and a few others are the ones who are pushing that narrative. Even when explicitly told it is for business & ideological reasons you’ll shove that into people’s mouths.

It’s great that you talk to developers and marketing personnel. Yeah 3rd parties wanna release on as many platforms. I’ll believe it when I see it when it comes to releasing on Nintendo platforms. It has gotten better but if all it took was sufficient power then again this should have been solved ages ago. Don’t be surprised when we go through developer/publisher bingo about why they aren’t releasing on the Drake. Or why Nintendo still doesn’t match up with them business or ideological wise.
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That's great, so wait and see. No point insisting it won't happen. I tend to agree with @Polygon here. Some people seem overly negative on this, see my own post a few post up discussing the meta of some Nintendo fan PTSD over 3rd party support.
 
Vash_the_Stampede said:
This would be a great business move, even if they tied it in with just the basic NSO account for 1st party games.
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Asking for more money to take advantage of the more expensive hardware that was just purchased is always going to be a bad look, no matter how justified it may be. The best approach is just to treat patches for existing games as an advertising expense.
Polygon said:
This needs to be repeated and repeated until some people understand that this is the current state of play in the video game industry in 2022.

A lot of Nintendo fans have this victim complex that the big bad third parties hate Nintendo because of the 90’s or don’t believe they can compete with their first party titles when the truth of the matter is this… If Nintendo have hardware and online infrastructure parity with Playstation and Xbox then they will get the exact same third party published games as those systems in 95% of cases. Third parties want as big an audience as possible for their games as long as the hardware can run their vision of the experience.

Drake (mainly because of DLSS) should mean it gets more ports than the current Switch but I honestly see a similar situation as this generation regarding third party ports once games start to be designed around 8 core / 16 threaded desktop class CPU’s and SSD’s especially once developers inevitably start to target 30fps again to squeeze all the visual juice they can from PS5 and the Series consoles.

Now Nintendo could go with maximum cuda cores to hit 3tflops on the GPU, an 8 core CPU clocked as high as possible, 16GB RAM and a 128GB SSD to secure a ton more third party ports. But will they? I don’t think there’s even a small chance of that when they can do 2tflops, 4 core CPU, 8GB RAM and no SSD and make an extra $50 profit from launch, have an extra hour of battery life, a much cooler console with less materials for cooling along with the above specs giving their first party teams the biggest visual leap since the Wii to Wii U generation.

In short Nintendo will never get full third party port parity unless they made a dedicated console again which was in the ballpark of the competition and that ain’t going to happen after the success of the Switch hybrid USP.
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I wouldn't necessarily assume that the third party situation of Switch will necessarily recreate itself with Drake. As I said, relative power is an important variable, but it's not the only one. The hardware games are actually being built for matters a lot, and I don't think it's obvious that that situation is going to play out quite the same way. Some thoughts on that in no particular order:
  • Nintendo is starting from a much stronger position than they did with Switch. For certain categories of games, both Switch and Drake will be strong contenders for lead platform.
  • PS4/X1 are taking their time fading away from relevance, and anything made for those will automatically be a good fit for Drake
  • Xbox Series S places some notable downward pressure on minimum requirements
  • The storage upgrade is not as big a factor as it may initially seem. This is an area where Switch is already broadly superior to PS4/X1. I'm also somewhat skeptical that the storage hardware in XS and especially PS5 will ever be fully taxed, as it seems a bit overbuilt.
  • As returns diminish, scalability will tend to increase
 
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Long post ahead:

People are grossly over reacting on the third-party support and the Nintendo fan reaction as if there’s this “PTSD” or this “Hate”. The reason why people say “it’s not that simple” is that the issue with Nintendo and third-party support is that Nintendo is Nintendo.

In order for Nintendo to get the same level third-party support as the other platforms, they nerd stop being Nintendo and be something else that they are not. We’ve already had developers that would struggle to try to find a slot for their a third party game because Nintendo releases too many games.

You would have someone that would make the excuse that they are unsure if the platform even has the audience for that type of game.

You would have those that even if the system was of equal footing in power level and also was equipped with a competent online infrastructure they would start questioning if they could even fit it on a game card without over filling up the storage of the system.

The issue with Nintendo‘s platform is that Nintendo is the one is running the platform.

Mind you, even the Xbox doesn’t get every single third-party game, despite being of equal footing to the PlayStation platform. Power is not the only reason for this, and even then Xbox has a superior online infrastructure compared to PlayStation. Let’s not try to pretend and re-twist the narrative into the issue being that Nintendo doesn’t release a powerful home console here.

Because we know straight up it is not that whatsoever.

Hell, you should already be expecting some to say that it’s a different architecture and it’s gonna take a bit more time to work with so that’s why things don’t come day and date.

Power has a factor into this, but that’s not really Nintendo‘s problem here, I’m going to repeat again what the problem is: Nintendo.

Now this may rustle some feathers, but the issues are all pointing to Nintendo being Nintendo as the problem. And shoving the narrative of “if they had a powerful console and a good online this would be resolved” is not looking at the forest beyond the trees at all the angles and seeing that at the center of this forest is one word in an open field called “Nintendo”

And no, I do not want Nintendo to stop being Nintendo if all they’ll give me is carbon copy number 3 in this monotonous console space if we left it up to the other two.

Only for a few extra third parties they are not guaranteed.
 
ReddDreadtheLead said:
Long post ahead:

People are grossly over reacting on the third-party support and the Nintendo fan reaction as if there’s this “PTSD” or this “Hate”. The reason why people say “it’s not that simple” is that the issue with Nintendo and third-party support is that Nintendo is Nintendo.

In order for Nintendo to get the same level third-party support as the other platforms, they nerd stop being Nintendo and be something else that they are not. We’ve already had developers that would struggle to try to find a slot for their a third party game because Nintendo releases too many games.

You would have someone that would make the excuse that they are unsure if the platform even has the audience for that type of game.

You would have those that even if the system was of equal footing in power level and also was equipped with a competent online infrastructure they would start questioning if they could even fit it on a game card without over filling up the storage of the system.

The issue with Nintendo‘s platform is that Nintendo is the one is running the platform.

Mind you, even the Xbox doesn’t get every single third-party game, despite being of equal footing to the PlayStation platform. Power is not the only reason for this, and even then Xbox has a superior online infrastructure compared to PlayStation. Let’s not try to pretend and re-twist the narrative into the issue being that Nintendo doesn’t release a powerful home console here.

Because we know straight up it is not that whatsoever.

Hell, you should already be expecting some to say that it’s a different architecture and it’s gonna take a bit more time to work with so that’s why things don’t come day and date.

Power has a factor into this, but that’s not really Nintendo‘s problem here, I’m going to repeat again what the problem is: Nintendo.

Now this may rustle some feathers, but the issues are all pointing to Nintendo being Nintendo as the problem. And shoving the narrative of “if they had a powerful console and a good online this would be resolved” is not looking at the forest beyond the trees at all the angles and seeing that at the center of this forest is one word in an open field called “Nintendo”

And no, I do not want Nintendo to stop being Nintendo if all they’ll give me is carbon copy number 3 in this monotonous console space if we left it up to the other two.

Only for a few extra third parties they are not guaranteed.
Click to expand...

Exactly! If you want a console to play third party games you shouldn't buy a Nintendo Console. All this thread does it constantly talk about third party games.
At somepoint people on this thread have to accept if they want a console to play big third party games they should buy from another brand.
 
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davec00ke said:
Exactly! If you want a console to play third party games you shouldn't buy a Nintendo Console. All this thread does it constantly talk about third party games.
At somepoint people on this thread have to accept if they want a console to play big third party games they should buy from another brand.
Click to expand...
I mean, sure, but that’s not really what I was getting at. Yes you have to buy more than one platform if you want to experience every game availability that you have in this gaming console space. but what I am getting at is up one size does not fit all. And when people are referring to third-party games in this thread, it is in reference to titles that aren’t technically demanding and skip the platform, to increase the probability of it occurring without any detriment. A very obvious title such as soul hacker 2 for instance which is skipping the Nintendo switch and it is very much not for some technical reason, thing looks like a PS3/360/Wii U Tokyo Mirage Sessions-esque.

You’re also misrepresenting what a lot of complaints are that to get implied about in this thread, people don’t expect big third-party games to even come to the platform in droves, and you’ve even been addressed this before about that but you’re still peddling this for some reason as if everybody is expecting these massive third-party titles. Mind you, Nintendo still has a third-party partners such as Capcom who have their own engines and their own games. Capcom is willing to port their games to the platform if it was easy enough to do so, but Capcom is not everyone and are only Capcom.


But that’s because Capcom is pretty savvy at casting their net as far and as wide as possible
 
Tentacle-tropes said:
Who’s talking anything about hating? You and a few others are the ones who are pushing that narrative. Even when explicitly told it is for business & ideological reasons you’ll shove that into people’s mouths.

It’s great that you talk to developers and marketing personnel. Yeah 3rd parties wanna release on as many platforms. I’ll believe it when I see it when it comes to releasing on Nintendo platforms. It has gotten better but if all it took was sufficient power then again this should have been solved ages ago. Don’t be surprised when we go through developer/publisher bingo about why they aren’t releasing on the Drake. Or why Nintendo still doesn’t match up with them business or ideological wise.
Click to expand...
Watch the metric ton of PS4/XBO ports arrive for Drake in its first two years despite having a tiny user base, Why? Because Drake will have the compute power to have those consoles ports without publishers having to spend millions of dollars and up to a year porting it to the platform because of the power disparity.

When Nintendo have sufficient hardware power they will get third party support. Hell the Wii U got the latest Assassin’s Creed, Batman, Splinter Cell, Deus Ex, Mass Effect, Darksiders, Need for Speed and Call of Duty all in its first couple of years because hardware wise it was in some regards slightly more advanced than PS360.
 
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