I'm afraid I have to disagree. Here's why:
- price: much more expensive than most people were expecting (£280 vs for example, £200 for a PS4 with a game)
- battery life: potentially only 2.5 hours? Really not good enough for a handheld.
- storage: only 32gb, will run out very quickly
- online offering weak vs ps4/xbox as only NES/SNES games and you only get them for a month
- very few titles on launch and key titles (e.g. Skyrim) delayed until much later in the year
Battery life and price are the real killers for me. I can see Nintendo slashing the price soon, just like they had to with the 3DS.
Edit: It seems like many others weren't impressed either. e.g. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-13-nintendos-preca...
-Battery life is 2.5-6 hours depending on the game. This is comparable to the 3DS line: http://kotaku.com/how-does-the-new-3ds-compare-to-the-older-.... We will have to see how well it does in practice though.
-Storage: The Wii U only had a basic 8GB which is enough for most use cases except downloading games. The switch can extend with SD cards too. As games will be shipped on cards like the DS I doubt this will be an issue for the average user.
-Online: I would consider the playing with others side of this more important than the free game. Though it is a shame that the games are only for the month. This is a fairly new thing for Nintendo so I hope it improves.
-Launch: it might have a few but I expect the fact that one of them is Zelda will help it a lot.
Personally I'm excited for it and it is perfect for my kind of gaming: mostly on the go. I'm rarely at home long enough to make the investment into systems that I can't take with me. Of course, YMMV.
[1] I'm not making a judgement call on specs here, just pointing out that, of course, an older console is cheaper.
[2] The accessories though, are not cheap.
And an even more conservative tripling of storage (64GB card) only sets you back about $20: http://amzn.to/2jfrROp
But I still buy the vast majority of my games on physical media, mainly because that's the only way to get a good discount. Until there's the option to be price-competitive via 3rd-party sellers, I'm not buying into any on-device game store at all.
The built in screen is fairly low resolution so there are potentially fewer pixels to push when the Switch is undocked. It remains to be seen exactly how quality/performance will be affected by undocking.
And its pretty much priced as a PS4 PRO, with 1 tb storage.
The games are on cartridges.. what year is this?
Assuming you are referencing optical media: A year in which optical media is actually having a hard time keeping up with cartridges in capacity and size and gets blown away on random read speed. (Possibly raw read speed too, depending on the specs.)
In the PS1/PS2 era, the optical media advantage in size and price per MB was clear. In the PS3 era it was possibly less clear, but still advantage optical media. But that advantage is largely gone now. The only advantage optical media has now is that it is still cheaper to make per MB (or GB if you prefer now), but carts have gotten cheap enough that that isn't necessarily a killer anymore.
Plus as I understand it, very few games even now fill a DVD, let alone fill a Bluray. And the optical media have some very significant disadvantages that are getting worse and worse relative to the rest of the hardware over time, particularly random read latency. Even the PS3 era required a lot of hacking under a lot of game's hoods to arrange the exact order things appeared on the disk to be able to stream in at anything like a reasonable speed, which is why this generation just straight-up requires you to install it to a hard drive (at least sometimes, I don't know if it's every game)... and even the hard drives they can afford to put in consoles at scale are starting to become performance bottlenecks themselves!
Optical media also means you aren't portable, which is a bit of a downer for the Switch.
Assuming you mean "why include anything at all and just let people download to local flash", I imagine it's because Nintendo still wants to sell to people who may not have internet connections that casually download 5GBs. Also, cartridge ROMs are a lot cheaper than flashable media, which is still expensive relative to the size of modern games to put in a console. I've got 512GB of very nice flash in my laptop, but that part alone cost more than the entire Switch. I imagine hitting their price points with enough flash to make it so that you're not constantly deciding which 5 AAA games you can fit on there would be quite difficult. Plus if they do ship out a game console in which the games are constantly "thrashing", Nintendo will actually pay for all the additional downloading that will result. And the end-user result is poor; "hey thanks for inviting us over but three of us need to agonize over which games to delete and then three of use will use your network connection to re-download Splatoon 2, oh dear, look at that, it's gonna take 5 hours" is not what they are looking for.
SD cards are not a perfect answer either; quality varies greatly. I can see why the 3DS has gotten away with it even as a putatively AAA console might not want to trust it entirely. It would help if people didn't buy the cheapest thing they could find with the capacity they want, but they do.
Err, the PSP would disagree with you. So would a whole generation of portable CD players.
I agree that SD is a better choice, or even the current gen of DS carts, but optical is not necessarily a killer.
And the battery power issues have relatively gotten more acute since then, as have the performance issues. It's less viable now than it was then, and it's debatable whether it was a good idea then.
On average, yes, but that's because "indie" and mobile games are quite small. An average big budget Activision/EA/Ubisoft game has been Bluray sized for years.
http://www.game-debate.com/news/14795/average-game-download-...
Whoah, can you source that? If that number is even remotely true the thing is completely useless as a handheld due to requiring 2-3 extra batteries for any longish trip.
Nintendo having an history of using proprietary cable, this is great news. Having the possibility to charge all of your device with one cable and sharing a unique powerbank is something really cool.
On the other hand, I think it could be a nice touch to give the customer an option to buy a case/battery combo, designed by the same manufacturer.
Likewise if it wasn't built in but came with the product, i'd be wanting a lower priced product not including the external battery.
> Battery life can last for more than six hours, but will vary depending on the software and usage conditions.
> For example, The Legend of Zelda™: Breath of the Wild can be played for roughly 3 hours on a single charge.
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2016/12/27/you-wont-be-able-to-upgr...
Battery life is on par with portable gaming devices currently so I am not sure if your expectations are a bit unrealistic. That said, it's 2.5 - 6 hours depending on the game. Something like Pokemon on the go might be a lot longer than 2.5 hours for something like Legend of Zelda.
Storage is probably ok. First, it's a cartridge based system so I don't expect game installs to take as much space as something like the PS4. Moreover, as others have pointed out, you can expand it by adding an SD card fairly cheaply...which is more than can be said for most consoles currently.
Online offering is pretty weak and I am disappointed that the industry has now made it "normal" for users to pay for online play in the console world...but oh well. On the other hand, local multiplayer and up to 8 device LANs is awesome!
Titles at launch are limited...but to be honest Zelda at launch will probably be enough to carry them through.
Regarding your killers, consider that the Switch has a USB-C connector so it may be possible to charge it on the go with a portable battery (perhaps even during use). That is huge when compared against the limitations of most gaming laptops (I am not familiar with other gaming portables though). Price is price, but I would focus more on the accessory costs than the console cost itself.
You can see the internals of the K1 here: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Nvidia+Shield+Tablet+Battery+Re...
The X1 Shield tablet's FCC filing show it also has a 5200mah battery so I'm guessing the layout is similar to the K1 and the Switch (the Switch filing just says the battery is non-removable).
Whatever the design, I hope it's better than Nintendo's previous handhelds which had a lot of blank circuit board where there could have been more battery volume: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Nintendo+3DS+XL+Motherboard+Rep...
It should be noted that both Microsoft and Sony recoup some loss leading with their subscription services.
Besides, this seems fairly on par with other portable gaming devices currently.
The flights that didn't have USB outlets were shorter anyway, so the battery would hold.
On every international flight I've taken, there has been USB power but zero power outlets in coach.
On top of this, I think they've made a fatal flaw when it comes to handheld pricing. If you remember, the 3DS launched at $250, tanked hard, and received a whopping 33% price cut only 4 months after it launched, followed by the announcement of the new 2DS which would be even cheaper. One of the things Nintendo produced the 2DS is because they found, to their great surprise, that almost 80% of 3DS customers outside Japan never took their 3DS outside the home. They weren't buying it for portability, like Japanese customers usually did; they were buying it because it was the cheapest way to play videogames, only a third the price of a console and with games that were half the price of console games (in many countries even less). Right now I can buy a 2DS for 105 and brand-new games for 40 where an Xbox One is 400 and games are 80 - 100. That's a big reason many of my friends have one.
Then note that they've also priced the Switch above the iPad Mini. Most handhelds are bought by parents for kids. If parents see that they can get an iPad for less than the price of this new console, they're very likely to: iPads are seen as luxury products with a wider variety of uses and many cheap games, and the iPad Mini is even more portable. This is the first handheld Nintendo have announced since iPads hit the market and I worry they haven't taken this into account.
For those customers, who make up a majority of 3DS customers worldwide, the Switch is a non-starter; it's likely to be considerably more expensive than its rivals, and those rivals happen to have either larger libraries, greater popularity, free online, and better graphics (Xbox One/PS4) or a luxury image, greater portability, lower software costs, and a wider variety of uses including educational uses (iPad Mini). I'm really hoping Nintendo succeeds, because I'm a big fan of theirs, but I worry they have totally killed the big draws to handhelds.
That's not true, they are buying a 3ds so they can play Pokemon. Without Pokemon every kid I know would rather have an iphone/ipad than a 3ds. (I'm talking about Pokemon Omega Ruby style games, not Pokemon Go).
I remember when the seventh generation came out, Microsoft did Nintendo's PR work for them by telling people that they can buy both a 360 and a Wii for the price of a PS3. That's right, they got Microsoft of all people to tell consumers to buy a Wii! Why did MS do it? Because the Wii is so qualitatively different from the 360 that they weren't directly competing.
Nintendo set things up such that nobody would ever ask "should I get a 360 or a Wii?" the way people would ask "should I get a 360 or a PS3?". Instead, they made it so a large amount of gamers wanted to get both a "normal" console and a Wii in the same way that people own both a console and a PC. On top of that, they also attracted people who would never buy a normal console because normal consoles don't appeal to them at all.
Sounds like me. I don't buy a gaming system to play games generally, I buy one to play the kind of games Nintendo makes and attracts to its hardware. That's why I still pull my Gamecube out to play SSBM from time to time, but have never owned a Playstation or X-Box, and have barely touched either of them. I haven't had a new system since GBA and Gamecube, but I think I'd enjoy the newer Nintendo systems more than the systems they were released next to.
I don't think that's right, price is not the only concern here. It's just a different feeling, from having to start a session on the TV or being able to play around the house, in bed, etc. -- tablets did that well also, and most people are more likely to open their 3DS than start up the TV and console. That's what they attempted to match here, and, to me, it seems successful. (Note that Wii U was directed towards that goal as well, but failed).
Or will it take the backseat when the customers notice that PS4 offers a lot more content for lower price? Especially since use of cartriges will mean that the games will be and stay more expensive than their PS4 counterparts?
It's a "make my kids shut up in the car or in a restaurant" device.
Here is an example study that tries to test the effects of apps vs. parents teaching foreign language words: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20855901
And you can use a Bluetooth controller.
[1]https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/global-games-market-rea... [2]https://www.statista.com/statistics/270291/popular-categorie...
Gaming in the living room? Xbox wins. Gaming in the bedroom? iPad wins. Gaming on a trip to visit Grandma? iPad wins. Gaming on holiday? iPad wins. Want to play low budget or free casual games? iPad wins.
I don't see them as equal in terms of specs, but I'm not interested in the same things as a 10 year old. I asked my stepson about it this morning, and he gave what I think was a pretty well-reasoned argument off the cuff about it, mostly that the games on the iPad are completely different to those on the xbox, and he prefers the games that are on whichever platform they are on, and he likes the portable nature of the iPad, but the xbox because multiple players can play together. Sounded like a more coherent review of the differences than I've read on some websites.
It's not all about specs, it's about gameplay. I'd actually say I've -enjoyed- playing games on the ZX Spectrum more than some PC games (with infinitely better graphics, sound etc), because I enjoy the game more, and because they could never rely on looking flash to engage you, so they -had- to be excellent games. Technically, there's no way that Manic Miner is a better game than all the FPS that my eldest stepson plays, but I'd take Manic Miner any day of the week.
Jeff Minter himself has abandoned iOS altogether, leaving an amazing collection of some of the tightest controlling and most gorgeous retro styled iOS arcade shooters completely defunct like they never existed. (Minotaur Project) [0]
(Let this also be a lesson to back up your iOS stuff, iCloud will not save apps that are removed from the App Store).
For me playing has mostly moved into the phone and tablet as I am often on the go.
RTS games are great for touch interfaces.
Personally, I use my iPad for games when I travel (and sometimes during my twice-a-week commute) and at home I play games almost exclusively on PS4. I rarely, if ever, play games on my laptop now, despite having over 300 games on Steam.
There are many beautiful and immersive games for mobile, for example Disney's Castle of Illusion and Star Wars Commander.
My house has a PS4, Ps3, Wii-U, a gaming PC, a Vita, and two 3DS machines. My kids spend 90% of their gaming hours on an iPad or phone. The PS4 is my favorite device.
So far it feels like "the Wii part 3". Yes the Wii sold well, but it didn't sell very many games. Most Wii owners were perfectly content with Wii Sports. The Wii U has pretty much been a flop. Nothing about this presentation suggests to me the Switch will finally do what Nintendo has tried three times now: make a gimmicky, low powered console that appeals in non traditional ways and is successful. So far (and sure, a 1 hour video 3 months before launch isn't much), this very much feels like the Wii and Wii U, and not in the good ways.
I love Nintendo and am a huge fan. But part of me can't help but wish Nintendo would just straight up compete with Sony and Microsoft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...
Some third party sales data which shows it was ahead of the 360 and PS3, launch aligned:
http://kotaku.com/5034951/heres-that-wii-third-party-sales-p...
Sony is dominating the high end, exclusive game market. The Last of Us, Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid and coming up in 2017: Horizon Zero Dawn, Death Stranding etc. All of these push the console to the limits and show just how superior the PS4 hardware is over its competitors.
Nintendo isn't really suited anyway. Their games are arguably better cel-shaded and cartoon-like. And so why not appeal to the less hardcore, graphics obsessed gamers. There's far more of them after all.
That said, yes, it seems Sony is winning this generation in consoles. But I would claim it's due to other factors than PS4 as a piece of hardware and OS.
The reason the hardware is important is because games like Uncharted, Last of Us etc (which are system sellers) stand apart from the likes of Witcher 3 because of the ability to use the superior hardware to product superior graphics. I would argue this is just as important as the game play. But again not for all games just these specific type of games.
Yes, PS4 has a slightly better GPU but even if PS4 and Xbox one shipped with hardware where xbox one was slightly better it would not affect the current market share that much.
Up to a point superior graphics are created by superior artists and animators. Using engine and art assets by superior programmers.
Uncharted is so good because of Naughty Dog, not because their platform happens to be PS4.
Sony has played their part well, whereas Micrsoft fumbled the Xbox one launch and positioning.
Now I don't know about The Witcher per-se but there have been a good number of multi-platform releases where performance and fluidity were compromised on XBox One.
And it doesn't just seem to be Sony, the numbers say it's Sony (especially in Europe). General consensus is that Microsoft severely botched the launch of the One and has been left to play catch-up since.
It's never been the case.
The GC was the most powerful console of its generation, the PS2 was by far the least powerful one (with the possible exception of the Dreamcast, not quite sure where that one was).
I'm not saying it was a supreme machine without limitation, I'm saying it was the most powerful one. It had by a fairly large margin the most powerful CPU and GPU subsystems.
That doesn't mean there were no tradeoffs, it was all strength and it was necessarily trivial to make use of that power. Think PS3.
So, I disagree with the first claim in your second paragraph, but my pedantry only supports your main point: PS2 won, selling 3 times the others put together. But PS2 was a long way from being the most powerful.
But, both as a developer and player, and purely subjectively, I do think XBox was the 'best' of that generation.
That's not true. The Xbox was far more powerful CPU/GPU-wise, and had far more storage (the 8 GB HD was pretty amazing) so games could install themselves to HD and use virtual memory to increase their performance.
Hyper Light Drifter is one of the most beautiful games I played to.
For me the Switch looks powerful enough to run beautiful games. A good art direction trumps raw power in almost all cases.
If the Switch is significantly underpowered compared to the competition, it means that developers won't be able to easily port XBone/PS4 games to the Switch which will hurt the Switch's lineup. In that case, Nintendo's best hope for success is that their Blue Ocean Strategy will take off and people will treat the Switch as not just another console but as a supremely versatile handheld.
The reason the Wii got away with it was a) Blue Ocean Strategy gave it genuinely unique games and b) the PS2 was still kicking around so the Wii version can easily be ported to PS2 and sell on twice the number of consoles (i.e. they'd make a 360/PS3 version and a Wii/PS2 version).
The Wii U had beautiful games with beautiful art direction (Yoshi's Woolly World, anyone?), but it still flopped largely because third parties ignored it and Nintendo didn't have a good enough Blue Ocean Strategy.
Surely though if you want that experience you can buy a PS4/Xbone/PC. Personally I'm really happy that Nintendo continues to give a different twist to their consoles and provide some texture to the market.
Surely the next step would be VR, though it's probably right to enter that arena partnered with an established player.
If smart-watches/wearables push on then people may move away from using a smart-phone form factor and instead have a paired device trailer more towards gaming and media.
I wonder if Switch can (in theory) run Android, whether it'll have Skype or other video calling (I didn't notice a camera?).
Well I don't love Nintendo, I think their consoles are pretty gimmicky and sales are fueled mostly by nostalgia and rehashing the same game titles over and over again (the Switch is getting a Zelda title and a Mario title? What a shocker!)
I honestly don't believe Nintendo is capable of competing with Sony or Microsoft. Maybe they could create hardware on-par with a PS4, but they can't get the publisher relations down, nor have they been able to get their online service to feature-parity with Xbox Live circa 2007 after a decade of trying. They also have this awful customer-hostile attitude that simply will not go away.
(Why should anybody have to buy a game title more than once, just because they bought a new game console? That's pure scam, Nintendo. On Xbox, you buy it once and you own it forever. On Nintendo, people re-buy Super Mario Bros 3 like clockwork every 3 years.)
Which is fine. There's already lots of competition in the "high powered console gaming" arena, and Nintendo would run the risk of becoming another SteamBox. And if their strength is nostalgia, maybe embracing that is a good business decision, even if the constant rehashing of the same titles over and over personally makes me gag.
You say that like this is a bad thing. Nintendo isn't just making the same games over and over again. Every new Mario game, and every new Zelda game, brings something new to the genre. For example, Super Mario Galaxy was a very innovative and award-winning game that had a very unique and well-thought-out core mechanic. And this new Super Mario Odyssey game they announced looks like it has a ton of stuff that hasn't been done in a Mario game before.
And ultimately, the first-party games Nintendo puts out, your Marios and Zeldas and whatnot, are always very polished, excellently-designed, and downright fun games. Typically the best games on the whole platform. So it's no surprise that they keep coming back to the same franchises, since they've demonstrated that they can execute extremely well with this IP and that fans absolutely love it. It's not unreasonable to say that Mario and Zelda by themselves sell a large portion of Nintendo's consoles.
I don't know if anyone ever argues that Nintento's first party games aren't the best games on their consoles. It just for many, myself included, the 5 or 6 excellent games that come out don't really justify the price of the console and the HDMI slot it occupies. I know I've never been able to justify a WII U (though Bayonetta 2 came close).
I hope they do better with the Switch—I'd love to justify the purchase :-). But I'm certainly not getting one at launch.
Also perhaps the only worthwhiles games on Nintendo's consoles.
Probably because I believe it is a bad thing.
> Nintendo isn't just making the same games over and over again.
Let's say I haven't owned a Nintendo console in a long time (which is true-- the last one I bought was a GameCube, which was a piece of crap so I sold it to my step-sister), how would I be able to tell that 2017's Mario is any different than 2014's Mario is any different than 2011's Mario?
If Nintendo genuinely has new game play ideas, maybe they should actually put those ideas in new games. They're not incapable of this-- for example, Splatoon looks genuinely innovative-- but they're more interested in keeping the nostalgia factor than marketing new game concepts. There's one Splatoon for every 10 Mario X or Zelda X or Metroid X.
> And ultimately, the first-party games Nintendo puts out, your Marios and Zeldas and whatnot, are always very polished, excellently-designed, and downright fun games.
Possibly; that doesn't make me interested in buying them. The 1998 Psycho color remake was very polished, excellently designed, etc. But it was just an identical remake of a movie that'd already been made, and if you've seen the original there's no point to seeing the remake.
> Typically the best games on the whole platform.
Because Nintendo's great at games, or because they can't convince anybody else to develop games for their wonky-ass platforms? The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
Just to drop a note here from the Xbox universe, the Xbox perennial first-party title is Halo. Halo 4 and Halo 5 kind of suck. Kind of suck a lot, really. But the strength of Xbox is that if Halo sucks, you can play Titanfall or Evolve or Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare or Battlefield 4 or... you get the point. And that's just in that one genre.
Unlike Nintendo, Microsoft (and Sony) isn't crippled by bad first-party games. If they were they'd probably put a heck of a lot more effort into ensuring their first-party games didn't kind of suck. So it's kind of an apples-to-orange comparison. Nintendo first-party titles are good because Nintendo has far more incentive to make them good.
> It's not unreasonable to say that Mario and Zelda by themselves sell a large portion of Nintendo's consoles.
Of course not; that's exactly what I've been saying. The company relies almost exclusively on nostalgia to sell its products. Mario and Zelda are nostalgic titles.
As a person who hasn't own a Nintendo console in a decade, what would be my incentive to buy one to play Mario? How the heck would I be able to tell that the Nintendo Switch Mario is any different than the ones that came before? If it is in fact different, why the heck isn't it in a different series?
(Of course the answer to that last one is: Nintendo's sales are fueled entirely by nostalgia, so of course they want the Mario or Zelda game on it because it's basically "free sales". People will buy it just because it says Mario on the cover. Which, going back to my first post, I find disgusting.)
So Nintendo is doing a great job (presumably) marketing to people who already love their products, but what reason are they giving a person who doesn't to try out the product?
> As a person who hasn't own a Nintendo console in a decade, what would be my incentive to buy one to play Mario?
Because it's a lot of fun.
> How the heck would I be able to tell that the Nintendo Switch Mario is any different than the ones that came before?
If you haven't played the ones before, then you don't really have a point for comparison. But in that case, the question doesn't seem meaningful at all. Why does it matter that it's different than the previous games, as long as it's fun? You certainly don't have to buy the latest console just to play Mario, you could buy an older console in order to play the older games. Or you could buy the latest console and then pick up older games on the Virtual Console. That said, if you're going to start with Mario (or Zelda or any other Nintendo IP), it's never a bad idea to go with the latest, then if you like it you can pick up the older games. Of course, if you're playing games from older platforms, the visuals won't be as good as the more recent ones. And you may also find that they're not quite as polished as the later ones, because they learn from their older games so that way each new one is better. Most notably, the current level design philosophy they have with Mario started with Super Mario Galaxy 1 (and refined in 2 and then Super Mario 3D Land), so the older games will feel a little different (info about this level design philosophy can be found in this interview - http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/168460/the_structure_o...). And of course there's an obvious important difference between the 2D Mario games and the 3D Mario games.
> If it is in fact different, why the heck isn't it in a different series?
Why? It's not radically different, every Mario game has a lot of commonalities (though each new game tends to introduce something new to the formula). And just in general, why throw away an IP that millions of people love? There's literally no upside to doing that.
Also, if we consider Zelda instead of Mario, even though each Zelda game is a brand new story, they're all connected to each other (a timeline of all games through Skyward Sword can be found from the book Hyrule Historia, or at https://zeldawiki.org/images/7/7c/Timeline_Hyrule_Historia.j...). But there are also really big differences between the games. As one example, The Wind Waker takes place on a series of islands scattered across a large sea, and you have a boat (that talks) that you literally sail from island to island, and with a lot of related mechanics around that. Compare that with the other Zelda games, where every other game takes place mostly on land without any sailing (except for Phantom Hourglass, which was a direct sequel to Wind Waker). Similarly, almost every game follows an entirely different character, but each character is basically a reincarnation of the Hero Of Time (Link).
And, if you subtract minecraft on Xbox, my kids spend 95% of their non-mobile gaming time on Wii U. No third party title time.
At any rate, I'm guessing it's when not if Switch will hit our house. Maybe I can hide it in my bag for a while before they find it. :)
That's a toughie and ventures deep into anecdote-only-data territory.
For about 3 years running, my PS2 was a Guitar Hero facilitating machine, and my PC was a Kerbal Space Program facilitating machine.
Actually, this has me very worried. Putting down the controller and pulling out a smartphone to manage my online matches seems about the worst possible user interaction they could think of. No matter how good this smartphone app is (and really, is it going to be good?), it's going to pale in comparison to just selecting a menu on the console.
The fact that they said this at all makes me think they still haven't figured out online interactions. Microsoft and Sony have them down pat, all Nintendo really has to do is just copy them. But instead they're trapped in their own bizzaro world for some reason.
Very much looking forward to the switch.
I don't know if anyone else noticed but I thought this presentation would have played better if it had been done with a western live audience because of cultural differences. The Japanese audience was very polite and seemed fairly quiet throughout the presentation. If it was done in front of western fans, there would have been continuous eruptions of raucous applause during each of the game presentations (much like an Apple event).
Dragon Quest X launched in 2012 on the Wii, and from the way he announced it, it's not coming to the west.
Not if you want to get lots of controllers, though.
Essentially, they placed value squarely in the face of everything your PC/enthusiast-level gaming rig won't ever replace. The ability to pick up and play elsewhere. Like the Wii, it's not even trying to compete with the current crop of consoles. It's value proposition will be placed somewhere a bit obtusely, between your mobile phone and everything else you leave at home. Yes, this obviously functions as a home console as well, but I can't help but suspect Nintendo absolutely meant to go for what makes handhelds great. If any company can do it, they can. So what if it cannibalises their current 3DS offerings? Pokemon seems to be going strong with its fanbase.
The whole presentation, from the demonstration of the hardware to especially the finishing trademark "One more thing!" with Zelda making a predictable but nonetheless amazing launch date. It's a strategy that worked wonders for the Wii, remember, so why not?
Nintendo absolutely killed it, and I'll be keeping a really close eye on this thing. But the marketing and presentation was honestly textbook.
[1] https://youtu.be/uuC4YLLkqME?t=33m20s