Nintendo Hardware is underpowered! 8 more days until Nintendo spills the beans

@_Matt_: I dont see why not, with the graphics downscaled a bunch theyd be able to make it work. You can adjust the graphics and still have good DoF, you think this is first time weve played massive games like Battlefield? Map size wouldnt matter as much with the graphics scaled way back. Could also drop the shadows and lighting which would help massively.

I'm kind of shock that switch is so under power. I thought it will at least be as powerful as the original PS4 if not more consider is more than 3 years advance.

@ni6htmare01: It has the ability to go portable, im shocked your shocked.

@iandizion713: the maps in BF1 are almost certainly the biggest of any BF yet. For the geometry alone you would probably need more power than the Switch has...

If you scale the graphics down to ps2 levels with 'Resident Evil fog of war' and smaller maps and lower player count (maybe 24?), and less vegetation and buildings you may just be able to play it . Remember, the rumoured Switch specs in its handheld form is the power of a mid range tablet, nothing more.

@_Matt_: O im positive they could do it. PC scales games down pretty impressively. And ive seen people makes some amazing optimizing mods for games to run on lower end PC's too.

@iandizion713: while it is a very nice feature, but I'm not sure in Nintendo is marketing switch as new 3ds that can use as console or target home console players.. You know it and I know it that people are crazy about graphic. I mean sometimes pretty graphics are more important than game play for some people so it is a big turn off for them when the spec is weak.. Now before you call me out I can tell you that I'm more than happy with PS4 graphic and think is great enough for a long time to come lol. But I can also tell you that most likely I'll will pass on the switch. First I do not game on the road. I'll rather read books or catch up some tv show I miss, also I'm not too crazy about Nintendo franchise. While they make really good games but I'm just sick and tire to see Mario and the bunch.. Come on is almost 40 years already.. I have been seeing Mario from kid to an old fart.. Give me something new lol.

@iandizion713: I'm not even sure if you're just trolling at this point, or if you actually believe the crap you're typing. Either way, if Wasdie and I can't make you understand, there's little point even trying sir.

I will say though, are you really trying to argue, that it would be easy enough to get one of the most demanding pc games currently out there, and get it working without gameplay compromise on what is essentially a mobile phone?

@_Matt_: Gotta agree with that. Graphics are gimmicks. You dont need them in games. Yall be making ZERO sense. Im guessing yall havnt experienced awesome optimization on PC yet, too use to console gimmicks.

@ni6htmare01: Bro, PS4 graphics are weak. Why you think they made Pro. They stated people were running to PC to chase better graphics and wanted to help put a stop to it. If you dont like Nintendo then why the hell would you even care? Seems silly to me.

@iandizion713: well I don't really care about Nintendo. It is more like Im curious. Tell me you wouldn't look at other consoles specs or details even if you not planning to buy one? Yeah on paper ps4 is weak, but the games look perfectly fine and nice or me. I mean I don't pause the games and check every details on the screen lol

@ni6htmare01: I have no interest in stuff that doesnt interest me. Its a waste of my time.

@iandizion713: well that's you lol.

@ni6htmare01: True.

@AdobeArtist: Power means literally nothing. Zilch. Nasal.

Go through games console history... Look and see what the most powerful console was in that generation. Then look and see what was the most successful. It's rarely the most powerful console of that generation. In fact it's almost always a weaker console.

The PS2 is the most successful home console of all time. The Gamecube was more powerful.

The DS is the most successful portable console of all time. The PSP was more powerful.

People play games. People don't play graphics.

Shield TV gets revised next year with parker, 1.5tf half precision. Kind of hope Nintendo abandon the dock and put their games on the shield, while the switch would be the HH

@emgesp said:

@Wasdie: Look at this picture and you'll see why Wii U's 1st party offerings was lackluster. Now imagine if those teams who developed those 3DS versions had made unique Wii U games instead.

Many of those are not even ports of the same game. :/

It'd like equating Uncharted 4: A Thief's End for the PS4 and Uncharted: Golden Abyss for the PS Vita.

Care to explain why you think it undersold? Its an absolutely fantastic game and so was Limbo.

@emgesp: I already did, dudebros don't buy them games. Look around you, lootk at all the flops in sales.

PS2 was less powerful, but it wasn't under powered like the Switch. There is a big difference to being the least powerful vs being under powered. Also, the Switch is coming out a full three years after the competition. In comparison the PS2 came out a year before the Gamecube. Power to a certain point most definitely matters.

Not everyone who owns a PS4/XB1/PC is a dudebro gamer.

@FireEmblem_Man: Oh bullshit. You have a bunch of people my age and ten years younger with fond feelings for the NES, buying it for their own young kids. The WiiU and Gamecube sucked dick at market. Lets see by June what the Switch is doing.

Sure, but they dont buy many games. Dudebros do. And dudebros dont buy them games. Its why so many flop in sales. Why you think Sony and them never announce top software sales like Nintendo. Cause its an embarrassing list. Its all the same shat.

I'm well aware of the trend how the most powerful console was usually last, or behind, in market share. And most often that was because power correlated to cost, and expensive consoles are hard to sell. Just look at PS3 in the first half of its life cycle.

But where in my post was I advocating "most powerful" as a necessity for a system? I'm talking about "competitive" specs for performance. There's a difference. Within each generation standards go up, so it stands to reason that platforms are expected to meet those standards.

Sure there are variances from one system to the next within the same time frame, but they're usually marginal differences. N64 was ahead of its competition in that gen, and even while Gamecube wasn't as powerful as OG Xbox, it still held its own for playing the same games on the same level. But beginning with Wii, their system specs fell drastically behind to its competition (PS3 and X360) to the point that 3rd parties had to exclude their games not just because of licensing but that the Wii couldn't play many of the same games (Skyrim, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, etc...). I mean they were completely behind on the HD standards.

I'm fine with a console not being "the most powerful", so long as it's comparable to reasonable performance within the generational standards. And if we can be really honest here, Wii's sales didn't come from the conventional core gaming audience. Most of its market share came from an entirely new audience, those without previous experience brought in by the novelty of motion controls, and playing non traditional games. Of course there was still the crowd loyal to the established 1st party (Mario, Zelda, Starfox, Metroid) but if not for this new "grandma is now a gamer" demographic, the Wii market share would be nowhere near where it was.

Oh and please please please please please PLEASE don't plead that misleading "People play games, not graphics." to imply that graphics don't matter. never forget that this is a visual medium. The VIDEO part of video games means that graphics is part of the gaming experience, not a separate quality. Graphics DO matter. Always has and always will.

Underpowered to maximize profitability... it's not like the economy is doing so well that folks are going to buy video game consoles like they did in the PS2 days. Welcome to the world in 2016 TC. But hey, maybe Trump will make America, and ultimately the world great again. Or we may return to the $800 Neo Geo and 3DO days. Either way, I have the backlog too keep me going for years!

So you think every indie game flops?

PS4 Pro seems to be doing just fine.

What happened to your last profile and why have you only posted 15 times?

I think majority on Xbox and Sony do. They jump on there desperate for sales. Remember even Rocket League complained saying they dont buy their games and had it not been for awesome PC fans they would have probably went under. And that game was hyped to high heaven.

I think Sony promised them, hey, if you make deal with us youll sale a shat ton of copies. And of course they probably lying cause they greedy arseholes knowing dudebros dont buy that shat.

Then when shat hits the fan, they just throw the developer under the bus like No Mans Sky...o, maybe they couldnt handle the hype, sorry for hyping them to high heaven guys. We did same for Dark Souls and pissed everyone off. Thats just what we do, we greedy arseholes.

@FireEmblem_Man: I deactivated my account with the intention of no longer posting here. It lasted almost 2 weeks. I just can't quit this place...

Rocket league devs almost went under? LOLWUT? Maybe years ago, but certainly they no longer have any financial issues AFTER Rocket league (except where to store their huge piles of cash). That game basically prints money. The developers seem to think "giving it away free" on Playstation Plus helped it get as big as it is.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-06-02-rocket-league-hit-usd110-million-by-giving-away-content-for-free

@2Chalupas: How much did it sell on Sony?

@AdobeArtist: Exactly, people are misunderstanding the difference between hardware standards and being the most powerful. Nobody said the Switch had to be more powerful than the PS4 to be competitive, but it sure as hell can't be severely underpowered and expect the same third party support.

@emgesp: Hopefully they dont get the same support, it will oversaturate the device.

Then it won't be as successful if it doesn't have those games.

@emgesp: Who cares. We dont need no Justin Bieber. We need some Milky Chance.

If the Switch underperforms then thats it for Nintendo when it comes to hardware. They are not gonna try a third time after two consecutive failures.

@emgesp: Theyll be fine, they dont have to get 100% third party to succeed. Combining 3DS and Wii U developers will be plenty for us.

If true, there goes third party support. I hope for Nintendo's sake they have their software pipeline worked out.

Well said. Throw in a Skyrim, Fallout, Dragon Quest XI and owners of the system should be very content.

I think there's an even bigger issue for Nintendo than hardware power. The raw numbers continue to be a bit of a distraction, to say the least.

I mean, bear in mind that developers are already used to scaling their games according to hardware power (hello, PC gaming!) - and if they aren't, they soon will be (PS4 -> PS4 Pro/Xbox One -> Scorpio). This is itself not necessarily the huge issue that some make it out to be.

The more important issues, when it comes to hardware, relate to architecture and development environment/support. It's one thing to produce a game that scales for performance (e.g. switching on and off certain shaders, or de-activing anti-aliaising - these sorts of things have been done on PC for many years and there are existing tools that allow you to feature-switch in that way).

The problem is when you build a game for one architecture and then you have to port the code to something completely different.

A crude analogy here is this: if I build a game for iPad, it's not a massive shift to also port that game to iPhone because the development environments are the same, as is the core platform. I'm also obviously working with the same OS and SDK.

But if I create an iPhone game and then port to Android? Different story. Now I'm working with a different SDK and a different set of tools (and rules). So, my workload (and thus my cost) is larger.

To come back to Switch: a developer is going to be less concerned about turning off anti-aliaising or de-activating some shaders in order to get stable framerates on Switch. That's not the real issue. The issue is that if I build a game on a particular engine or with a particular framework, how easy is it for me to port that code to Switch? What environments will I need, what toolsets will I need? How much code change will I need to do that port?

At the moment, nobody really knows the answers to those questions. But those questions - rather than raw hardware power - are, I think, the important ones. We get so consumed with clock speeds and memory, but that kind of misses the point.

For Nintendo, regardless of clock speed and memory, they need to be really focused on building a platform (including support for relevant industry-standard tools) that is going to make it easier for developers to port code without making huge, fundamental changes. That will be the key thing on the hardware/middleware side that will matter a great deal for Switch third party support.

@Ghost_Dub: Yep, yep...Dark Souls, Monster Hunter, NBA2K, Chinatown Wars 2. We dont need much.

It will help, but it might not be enough if some of those games don't appeal to people outside the Nintendo fandom.

@djura: Sure, but a certain level of power capability is still important for the game to even run well even if a port is possible. Remember just because a game can be ported doesn't mean it will run well. You can only water down a game so much until the experience no longer becomes the same, especially if the game was built with PC/PS4/XB1 hardware in mind.

Some games will be easier to port than others, but games like Mass Effect and RDR2 are definitely off the table. There is just no way that the Switch could handle those games with the rumored specs at least not to the level EA and Rockstar wants. 25GB's of memory bandwidth (Tegra X1) is garbage for modern open world games. Remember Skyrim is a 5 yr old game at this point and was designed with PS3/360 hardware in mind, so that isn't saying much for the Switch.

Thats their problem. If Nintendo dont appeal to you, find something that does. The industry is more diverse then ever. You have Mobile, Nintendo, Xbox, Sony, PC, and Mac. Way too much imo. I think only room for Mobile, Nintendo, and PC.

Nintendo doesn't have the luxury of having a huge reliable fan base anymore. Nintendo needs to appeal to gamers outside Nintendo fans to make the Switch successful and if they aren't catering to them at all then the Switch won't do too well.

If the Switch is just another Mario, Zelda, Pokemon box then its going to under perform in sales. It'll sell to hardcore Nintendo fans and thats it. Also, no it won't sell anywhere as well as the 3DS, especially not at the rumored price.

@emgesp: Well just do it the old fashion way and grow more Nintendo fans. Using Mobile devices will help Nintendo grow into a much stronger company. AAA gaming is shrinking. Would be silly to cater to their fanbase. AAA has been trying to grow using Mobile, but doesnt seem to be working. Sony has been trying also but has failed like usual.

Well they are 1 - 3 so far when it comes to their mobile offerings in terms of success. Mario Run seems to be underperforming. Yes it was downloaded 5 million times, but that doesn't mean 5 million people actually paid the $9.99 for the full experience.

https://www.techcentral.co.za/super-mario-run-risks-being-a-super-flop/70780/

@emgesp: Bro your using numbers from 1st day in the United States only. Come on now, lets not be silly. And Miitomo is a social App that is still used today and growing. Miitomo still gets updates today and thanks to Super Mario Run it has gotten more people to use it thanks to Iphones related Apps section.

In just the first day Super Mario Run made it to top grossing games. Super Mario Run also broke ALL records for Mobile gaming. Cause you know, Nintendo like to do it big. Big Boss Hoss.

Yes, but investors don't seem too excited for Super Mario Run anymore. Not good.

Nintendo should consider getting rid of the always online aspect and maybe drop the price to 4.99.

@emgesp: Mate they do buy low sell high. You should know this shat. The stock will rise again before and after Switch reveal. Then if Switch releases and is successful, theyll sell high again. You do know how this shat works dont you?

They expected Pokemon Go level of performance.