It's not fair to compare home console ports to Nintendo Switch ports, a mobile console with a mobile-grade Soc. Some graphics and performance losses are expected and excusable, depending on whether it's still worth it to you.

Every trailer labeled "Nintendo Switch" shows footage taken from an actual Switch; you can at least gauge how well it runs or whether visuals are good or not. (And there's tech reviewers like Digital Foundry)

Comparably, Cyberpunk's most recent gameplay demo was purely next-gen (and "mid-gen" like PS4 Pro), and reviewers were playing on PC and not allowed to show footage. You couldn't know about X1/PS4 experience until it was too late.

> Anyone who's read up on Cyberpunk knows that it's going to strain even the best gaming PCs, so it should be no surprise that it barely runs on last gen consoles.

This game was announced when PS4/X1 just came out, even if you account for development starting years later that's still within the peak of their cycle. If it weren't for the last 3 delays (only 7 months combined), Cyberpunk would be releasing on those same consoles before PS5 was even announced. 15-24FPS, 540p gameplay would not be acceptable then and it should not be acceptable now.

You make some good points, so let me try to better explain where I was coming from.

There are certain games-- the ones that get all the PC gamers to buy new graphics cards when it's about to come out. When there's a game like that coming out soon, I just know it's going to run like shit on console and everyone's going to complain. This was true when Crysis came out in 2007: all the PC gamers upgraded their graphics cards to play it, and the guys on Xbox360 just had to put up with a blurry mess running at 20fps. Same thing happened with Just Cause 3 in 2015. A bunch of others, too.

I don't mean to say that it's okay; if you sell the game on a certain console, one would hope that it'd run well there. I just think it's entirely predictable which games are going to have this problem (it's the ones that got the PC gamers to buy new graphics cards so it would even run), and then I'll hop online and everyone's talking like it took them by surprise.

I got your point, and I agree a few generation-defining games are notoriously more demanding and one shouldn't expect a great experience on console, but there's a limit to that downgrade. 540p 15FPS is below the bare minimum something ought to run, if it gets that bad, maybe it's better to just outright say "you need a PS4 Pro / Xbox One X or newer to play, sorry". I say this as a PC gamer with no current-gen (PS4/X1) or next-gen console at all (except the Switch if that counts in this context).

And IIRC Just Cause 3 was just bad all around, the PC port was extremely buggy as well.

The game had several release dates _this year_ that were before the current round of consoles were out. Considering those were the only consoles it was going to be on at release if it hit one of it's many slated release dates this year it's totally inexcusable that this is the state the game is on on that hardware.

PC gaming culture (you can play it on that rig but it'll barely run) Vs console gaming culture (it should work and performance shouldn't be a thing you think about)

They've actually added a ton of settings for the switch to run the Witcher 3 very well: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-the-w...

I basically played it with everything on max and had no slowdowns which is impressive frankly. Obviously rendering on a Switch doesn't compare with a PC - an obvious statement if anyone takes a look a the HW specs.