Nintendo finally reveals the Switch console

It’s great that they’ve moved away from motion controls, as they have definitively failed in the marketplace.

I appreciate their target here, but I don’t see it grabbing hold. People play tons of games while out and about-- on their phones. Not on dedicated hardware. Not in 2016.

If Nintendo was smart, they would have partnered with Google or Nvidia to build co-branded Nintendo android phones and tablets. Imagine something slick like a 5.5" Pixel XL, but 50% thicker and heavier to accommodate a much larger battery, with attachment points for gamepad controls or a TV dock on each side.

Actually if they were truly smart they would have moved well beyond just building co-branded hardware-- they would have approached Google to become the face of gaming on Android period. Their brand cachet and first-party stable would have cinched the deal.

That would be not only innovative but potentially disruptive.

It’s a home console you can take with you. You’ve completely missed the point.

Disrupt deez!

Fuckin’ OUYA, can’t believe I got one of those. Y’all can laugh now.

Hey man, at this point we’re laughing with you, not at you.

Mostly. OUYA. Jeezus.

Imagine how much scammier the Phantom would have been if Kickstarter had existed.

I went to E3 meetings for that shit, and even as a baby journo it was transparently bullshit.

That thing’s kickstand looks like it’ll snap or bend easily.

The thing that concerns me most is how easily those little joy-con things could be lost.

If it’s built like a tablet, I can never buy one for my kids, since they’ve broken 1 tablet each. Unless of course Nintendo releases a super awesome case that is indestructible.

Of all the things I find intriguing about the Switch, my favorite is that when the shoulder buttons on this Nintendo handheld inevitably fail, you don’t have to buy the entire console all over again.

New topic, same concerns. I don’t see how this will be a bigger hit than the Wii U. Maybe it doesn’t need to be, but on a personal level, if Nintendo’s happy doing its own thing in a niche corner of the video game market, then I wish they’d kept doing their own thing on the Wii U instead of letting it die.

If rotating through the Nintendo hits—Zelda, Mario, Mario Kart, Smash Bros—with a few surprises in the mix (Splatoon, Mario Maker) wasn’t enough to keep the Wii U alive, why will that strategy be enough to make the Switch a success? Is it going to be dramatically cheaper to produce? Is there enough Pokémon Go money trickling back to Nintendo that they just don’t care?

Because it’s still unclear how this will gain the support of the third parties you need to break out of the niche the Wii U held onto.

On the home console front, I think they’re right back to a system different enough (or underpowered enough) that they can’t count on ports, so how are they going to drum up the third party support for a new system? If the Wii U didn’t have the numbers to warrant third party ports and originals, how is resetting that install base to zero going to help?

And on the portable front, even in the best case scenario regarding technically viability (meaning, assuming battery life is great), a portable gaming device is never going to reclaim what the smartphones and tablets took out of the market. You game on the device you have with you anyway. The Switch will be capable of so much more than a smartphone, but not enough people will care, and we’re right back to “where is the developer support?”

My cynicism boils down to this: everything in that video looks like a cool feature for a system that will never have any more developer support than the Wii U did. Is that okay?

Or maybe you’re missing the point. Only time and sales will tell. We’ve all got our hunches right now about the portable gaming market.

there are some names on the list above that suggest ports may not be a problem.

Looks janky as shit. Not interested in what I’ve seen so far. Trying to do too much at once, and making me pay for portable features on a unit I plan to use as a home console.

Probably gonna skip this one unless something interesting is revealed before March.

Well, this pretty much guarantees that I’d be able to play the next monster hunter on the big screen AND the small screen and only need to buy the game once!

Also, no hinge to break.

For me, absolutely. But I do think this has a modest chance of getting decentish third party support (Gamecube level, say). For a start, they’re no longer splitting the audience between handheld and console, and bear in mind the 3DS has done pretty well (and had reasonable third party support), especially in Japan. It’s no DS, but nothing is. 60m units is nothing to sniff at. It should also be much simpler to port games from other platforms, on the design front anyway, given the single screen and built in traditional controller.

Yea, as @Ginger_Yellow points out the gimmick on this one isn’t in the controls. That is a huge difference in porting difficulty. It is all the same basic control ideas, mostly, just with different form factors. The tablet with on side controllers is fine for playing on the couch while my wife watches TV.

Perhaps it is just me, but my family situation is such I can see this having a lot of potential benefits. We have one TV, so it’s not like consoles work out great for us. I can totally see playing 2p Mario in the tablet stand mode with separate controllers. My son would dig that, I think.

It is a gimmick, sure, but one that should have negligible impacts on the actual gameplay. Which could not be said of the Wii or WiiU.

Those controllers look atrocious.

I appreciate that it is something different, but for me personally…I do not see much use for it.

If I want to play a big immersive game, I definitely want to be playing it on my 55" plasma. Having it mobile is useless to me since I would not want to play game like Witcher 3 or Skyrim on a tiny screen.
And for more casual games, I already have a cell phone with big 5.5" screen, Intel CPU with 4GB RAM. Not to mention when outside and bored, I often prefer just reading internet anyway.
And using Tegra means it will be again left behind by developers making full console/PC games.

Agreed. They seem suitable only for elves or people with freakishly tiny hands…

I’m guessing they will sell VR goggles with this and have it work like smartphone goggles.

With the wireless controllers could be good!