It’s easy to take the predictable side of a bet! Gotta give me odds. ;)
I don’t think Nintendo will ever make a non-portable console again. Switch and 3ds were monumentally successful (not Wii numbers, I’ll concede).
Actually, I believe they both did better than Wii Numbers.
The Switch bypassed the Wii in numbers and the best selling consoles for Nintendo have always been handhelds. It’ll be extraordinary for Nintendo not to do handhelds.
I’m still very confused by justaguy2’s logical reasoning behind Nintendo’s future decision
- The Switch is our best selling console ever
- Hey guys, check out this boutique product by Valve, they do certain things even better than us.
- ???
- Instead of copying them or ignoring them, we’ll just give up and never make another handheld console.
Like, what the heck could step 3 be that would lead to step 4. I don’t get it.
Hopefully you’re correct. Nintendo has tried every gimmick in the book to avoid competing with Sony/MS on performance, 3D, the stupid WiiU tablet thingie, motion controls, etc, but I agree they should stick to mobility. Nintendo’s next console should be the Switch 2, an evolution of their current wildly successful product, not some new wild n’ crazy device.
Anyway, Nintendo doesn’t need to compete with the Steam Deck on performance or flexibility. They simply need to run first-party Nintendo games.
Sure, you can run them on the Steam Deck in emulation too, but that’s a pretty technical niche thing to do. Of course like everything else, piracy has matured tremendously over the past decade alone, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see handheld clones running SteamOS with a library of every Switch game ever made ready to play on banggood.com, just like you can buy streamer boxes ready to play every movie and TV show ever produced. These things never go mainstream, though.
The Switch is going to be with us for at least 2 more years.
Remember, Valve doesn’t have a monopoly on handheld PCs, things that run Linux, or things that run Steam. The Steam Deck is the only one that’s any good right now. That’s not going to be the case for long.
Nintendo also has a history of surprising you, and trying stuff that is distinctly not what everybody else is doing. My best guess is the next thing Nintendo does in 2 years is not going to be “the thing they were doing 2 years ago, and that everybody expected them to keep doing at that time.”
I bet whatever they do will be cool, though!
Put me down for “clamshell device (ala DS) with Switch-level+ power and folding touchscreen”
I want tactile holograms! We can finally tickle Mario!
That would be rad, but I wouldn’t call it a gimmick at all. Super useful improvement.
A folding touchscreen would be pretty amazing.
Ok, how about it has physical button layouts that let you play games in either landscape or portrait orientation?
I can’t picture in my head how you’d do that without compromising both orientations. The switch joypads already feel like crap compared to the pro controller or the steam deck because they’re so cramped.
I have no reason to believe this to be true, at least not for several years. The other console manufacturers have no reason to try to enter this space, PC OEMs definitely don’t care, and Chinese manufacturers largely don’t have the clout to partner with AMD or Nvidia on custom hardware that’s powerful enough to compete with the Steam Deck, which is why I also think stusser is wrong about the idea of Chinese knockoffs that are powerful enough to fill the same role. The only other company that’s really working in this space and can make enough units to serve a market is GPD, who makes $1300 handheld Windows PCs with traditional components, not $400 Linux handhelds with a custom APU.
I do expect we’ll see other powerful handhelds, but even the current popular Steam Deck/Switch alternative, the Odin, isn’t powerful enough to emulate most Switch games at playable speeds. As long as other companies are stuck using off-the-shelf Android-focused chips, as the Odin does, I don’t expect that to change any time soon.
Me neither. But you wanted a gimmick!
You don’t need a custom APU. The 6800u is a 15w Zen3 APU with 12 RDNA2 GPU cores running at 2.2Ghz. Compare that to the Steam Deck’s APU, 15w Zen2 with 8 RDNA2 GPU cores running at 1.6Ghz. The 6800u is roughly twice as fast on the GPU side and is widely available to anyone who wants it.
The pressure comes from Valve’s very aggressive pricing-- it may not be worthwhile for OEMs to compete until component prices drop.
@Misguided: My position is that Nintendo should stop with the stupid gimmicks because they finally found something with staying power, and they should continue to innovate on the Switch with a Switch 2.
If we really see a Steam Deck 2, I wonder if exclusively console gamers will pick up on it as an alternative to Sony/MS/Nintendo.
While an open platform with no online subscription fees for basic features is a huge plus to me, is that something that’s even on their radar as desirable? Or is basically just - “does this physical DRM for first party games have the games I want?”
Sony and MS no, absolutely not, as even a Steam Deck 2 won’t be 4k capable on your bigscreen TV. Switch also absolutely not, as it won’t play non-pirated Nintendo games.
Of course. But history suggests they will follow up on the success of the switch with some goofy new functionality no one asked for or wanted, as they did with the Wii U and 3DS.
Yep and that’s what they shouldn’t do!