Square Enix Is Interested In Bringing Older Titles To Nintendo Switch

2 games: Dragon Quest X and Monster Hunter 3. The others aren’t AA games.

By that measure, the Switch has no large third-party exclusives.

Switch got already theirs (Sonic Forces, FIFA 18, Mario Rabbids, NBA 2k18, WWE 2k18), and we don’t know what will sort out until march. Still eventually Nintendo didn’t care to sign exclusives since it has so much first party games to rely on.

Wasn’t your whole point about “original content”? You just named 5 games and only one of them is exclusive. WWE 2k18 also doesn’t count. That is, without hyperbole, the worst port I have ever seen and I feel terrible for the kids who are getting that for Christmas. I mean look at it. It should NOT have a been released.

Performance wise the Switch is (still today) perfect for 300$ an hybrid console. The chipset is (still today) very good.
A more customized and advanced system means ‘money’. I doubt people would have been happy to pay 350/400$ for a beefed up Tegra. I certainly would have not been (and would have skipped the console).

Not necessarily. Even custom chip would cost Nintendo maybe $25-30 per unit and a Tegra is rumored to cost $40 per chip since Nvidia is paying to license the ARM cores, paying for TSMC for manufacturing and then selling it to Nintendo at a profit. The only reason that something like Qualcomm’s chips cost like $70 is because they include a cellular modem blocks. Furthermore, additional investment by Nintendo would have been worth it just to be able to choose when or if they want to start manufacturing on a newer process and allows them to control how their chips progress. With the TX1, they aren’t using four of it’s CPU cores, any of it’s six camera interfaces, it’s HDMI controller, image signal processor, SATA controller, and all of it’s display controllers are overbuilt (all 4k60).

If there is a Switch 2, they would only need to improve on the CPU, GPU, memory controller and maybe DSP, yet the TX2 adds a Gigabit Ethernet block, 2 Denver cores, upgrades the ISP, upgrades the camera interfaces to 12 HDR cameras, adds support for an un-used third 4k60 display, allows it to encode 4K60 video, and adds on-die safety management and a dual CAN interface for automotive use. Meanwhile, actual CPU and GPU performance would really only come from clocking things 50% higher.

And lets not forget that, if Nintendo doesn’t use the TX2 and still works with Nvidia, Nvidia would have to make a custom chip for them anyway and by that time they would have had their eyes off the mobile market for years so it’s complete guesswork as to whether or not Nvidia could give them something competitive.

It has met the double standard perfectly. Otherwise people would not have bought it. I’m pretty happy about its performance as a home console, since I play it mostly attached at the TV. While I appreciate the chance to detach the console from the TV.

Consumers assume someone is going to deliver on what the box says: a 720p experience on the go and a something at least a little better when docked. Since Nintendo’s own games general do that and make up over 80% of Switch software sales, most people haven’t played the games that don’t meet that standard. However, even Nintendo’s own titles are starting to fall below that if you look at Xenoblade Chronicles 2. I’m not sure if you have it but, that game runs 720p30 docked and resolutions as low as 368p with a sharpening filter and frame rate drops while handheld. Then look at games like Bayonetta 1 and 2 which are rumored to be running at 720p60 on Switch. The situation is worse with some third party games. Doom is 720p30 docked, 540p handheld with frame-rate dips. RiME is 720p30 docked, >720p30 handheld with the game freezing for several seconds and dropping frames when going through new areas. People who played Rocket League say there’s no way it isn’t running below 720p when docked. You already saw how WWE2k18 runs when docked, imagine how it runs handheld.

Even barring any performance issues, the space issue, which is made worse by the hybrid concept of the system is requiring people buy a decently large microSD card just to fit larger games even if you buy games physically. With a 128GB card, it makes the system $340. A 400GB microSD card makes the system $550 and you’d only just catch up with the available space that competing consoles had in 2013… and people thought that was too little back then. In this respect, it’s far worse than even the Wii U. With the Wii U, you could spend $100 and get a 3TB external HDD and if you don’t like using HDD and don’t need that kind of space, you could get a 128GB flash drive for $25 or even a 512GB flash drive for $150. Either way you had way more price effective options that better solved the space issue.

How can something meet the double standard perfectly if it has problems that consoles from 2012 and 2013 don’t even have?

Nope, I’m talking about the DS. Still the 3DS has been a success too, but eventually even in the name it couldn’t differentiate it enough from the original DS and didn’t end up selling like it. Still Nintendo is very happy about its performance. 70 millions console are very good sales. Iconic? I don’t know. Maybe. The original definitely.

Again, a large reason why the 3DS didn’t sell as well as the DS is because the DS and Wii markets were completely different. Carnival Games on Wii sold more copies than Skyward Sword. Can you imagine that happening now? Hell no. It has no where near the wow factor that the 3DS and Wii had when they launched.

Nope, those games makes tons of money on the PC. Still they sell that well on consoles but they are PC games.

First of all, almost every Final Fantasy game came out on a console first and some have never come out on PC and that included the newest one. Franchise like Assassin’s Creed sell SIGNIFICANTLY less on PC. Unity sold 7 million copies on consoles and half a million on PC. Black Flag sold over 11 million on consoles, half a million on PC. AS3 sold 11.8 million on consoles, .9 million on PC. Far Cry 4 sold 6.4 million on consoles, .6 million on PC. Even Grand Theft Auto 5, which you would assume would sell decently on PC because of the modding community only sold 1.3 million on PC but sold 61.5 million copies on consoles. When games are selling 22-47x more copies on console than PC, the PC sales become insignificant.

I have a PC just wanted one console for easy fun, the Switch was just perfect. Those games you cited I play on the PC if I do like them, while for Nintendo exclusives and third parties exclusives I need the Switch.

I understand that, but also understand that you’re a minority when it comes to that. The majority of people don’t play on PC, they play on consoles, and as a platform-holder, it’s important to the success of their business to get games like GTA, which can sell 21 million copies on a single system, onto their platform.

Can I ask what games you got for the Switch?

But Switch started after the failure that was the Wii U, if it had some third party support in the first year it’s a miracle, then it’s a completely different machine than the competition. It takes time to build apposite software for it.

I’m not sure I get what you’re saying here.

Custom chip cost to develop and that cost you have to recover from actual sales. That’s why consoles cost so much at start.
Just the SoC design vary from 50 to 300 millions dollars.

Everybody acts like using a custom chip for a console or handheld is unheard of. When you’re a platform holder getting money from third-party sales, that gets recovered quickly. When the PS4 launched, it’s bill of materials plus manufacturing was less than $20 below MSRP. Factor in shipping costs and it’s likely that neither retailers nor Sony was making any money on the actual hardware. However, retailers and console holders each get about $15 of each game’s sales. Using your numbers, then if the custom SOC in the PS4 cost sony $300 million then they would have made that back about 6 months in on software sales alone and that doesn’t count any of money made on DLC. At this point, GTA V alone has made Sony $241 million. That $300 million would have been an investment on Sony’s part.

The Switch 2 would have a completely new SoC, maybe in share with some other tablet, that’s the way they can avoid high development costs.

Are you suggesting that they’ll switch to Qualcomm because Nvidia has left the mobile SoC market? I believe I mentioned this before.

https://phandroid.com/2014/05/22/nvidia-ceo-interview/

The TX2 is the last SoC they made designed to fit within the TDP of a tablet and even that was designed more with self driving cars first and foremost. The chip after that, Xavier, is targeting TDPs of 20-30 watts and will have a die size nearly as large at the PS4’s at launch. It will also drop the power efficient cores altogether and have 8 denver cores, it’s GPU is made with deep learning in mind which has to do mainly with low-precision integers, and it supports encoding and decoding 8K video as it’s primary input in cars would be multiple car cameras. It’s energy efficient for what it is but it’s not the designed for tablets. In fact, these things are typically water cooled so it’s unlikely they’re even tested in passively cooled configurations.

720/30 is ok, it’s problematic when you drop from it but 720/30 is pretty standard console gaming. Asking more from a tablet size console is wasting time. There are 1080/60 games but you can’t have it for heavy weight games. No one expect that on a Switch.

At this point, the vast majority of console games on other systems run above 720p. As of a year ago there were 13 games running at 900p on PS4 and the rest run at 1080p with a good amount running at 1080p60.

I agree that the Switch’s hardware is pulled thin at 1080p and really isn’t what it’s best suited for. That doesn’t change that fact that the screen, which is only used for portable mode, is 720p thus creating that expection for that mode. Just a few days ago I saw someone on here fully expecting Metroid Prime 4 to run at 1080p60 and there are many people here who expected RiMe to run at 1080p30 on Switch. Regardless of what the TX1 and is capable of, the hardware design has created an expection among players that it’s really having trouble reaching. Had they chosen a 540p or 480p screen then maybe expectations would have been more in line with what it can do reliably.

It’s all about costs. We all know that Nintendo want to make money out of the hardware too, so storage is poor. Still they open the possibility to expand it via SD cards that are pretty cheap nowadays,

I understand that they want to make money from their hardware so I understand the appeal to Nintendo to spend very little money on storage, but the Switch has about 1/16th the storage of a PS4/XBO but there games are 1/16th the size. So whether or not microSD cards are cheap doesn’t change the fact that expanding storage on them is not only required depending on the games you want to buy but is way more costly than other systems. Even if they decided to use SD instead of microSD, they still would be far behind the cost effectiveness of flashdrives, SSDs, and hard drives but it would still lower the cost per GB from aroudn 62 cents to 43 cents.

Nintendo want to make money from everything, that’s it. I’m much worried about the cost of the accessories. Those are truly high.

I agree that the accessories are way to expensive, that included the controller but it especially applies to the dock. I would be surprised if those cost them more than $10-15 to manufacture.

Final Fantasys is the exception of the rule, but now even they are full PC games.

I figure you would drop this once I pointed out that that’s not a point. When you say something is a PC game, you infer that that is where the majority of it’s player-base is. None of the most popular franchises ha the majority of their player base on PCs. If you were to tell me that theres no point in Starcraft or Warcraft coming out on consoles, I might agree with you, but that’s not the case with Assasin’s Creed, Final Fantasy, etc.

They got released there, they are developed there so it’s all the same. Long ago games were developed directly on the hardware, PS1/PS2 time. With the PS2, in its late life, began to arrive third party tools. Third party tools are PC based (Unreal Engine, Unity), so it’s all PC there.

Game developement has been on PC for years upon years. That doesn’t change anything about their player-bases. GameCube games were not only developed on PCs (with connected dev kits) but the first Pikmin game actually has an executable on it that allows you to play demo of the game in Windows. Does that make Pikmin a PC game?

Even Switch has third party tools today, but got tons of software unreleased on PC. Those are still (just) console games, developed with just the Switch in mind.

I’m not sure what your point is with the third-party tools thing.

Not much minority sincerely,

No, you’re very much in the minority. A lot of people say “Why does it matter that the Switch won’t get that game when I can buy it on a PC?” or “Why should I get an XBO/PS4, when I can play those games on a PC.” but sales show that either the majority of those people are full of themselves or they’re a loud minority. You saw the numbers I presented to you, games sell on consoles at least 10 to 47 times more copies on consoles.

Switch is telling like no Nintendo hardware, except maybe for the Wii.

Yea, it’s selling at pretty much the exact same speed as the PS4. Both reached 10 million units in 9 months though the PS4 was 30 million software sales while Switch is at 20 million.

In 2018 we will see if it’s going to mantain those sales. Still it’s an impressive achievement. I hope Nintendo will not slow down, but I npresume there will be less Nintendo original content and more third party content.

Third-party content won’t be an issue if third-party sales do well.

EVentually they took some from the Wii U line.up to make the first Switch year stellar. Still they have almost abandoned the 3DS so they are really focused on one console at this time. So everything will work out in the end.

That’s high hopes and I tell you why…

My games are Zelda, Mario Kart, Splatoon 2, Arms, Fast RMX, Stardew Valley and coming Mario Odissey. Plus I plan Octopath.

I’d imagine many of the people on here might own about as many games as you and many probably own those same games. However, while your own taste in games is very typical of Switch software sales (5/7 or 71% of the games you bought for it are by Nintendo), the amount of games you own for the system is atypical. Since we first started this conversation, Nintendo announced that they have sold 10 million Switches but their software sales are 19-20 million meaning that there’s about Switch games sold for every Switch sold. This is simplifying it but, for every person like you who owns 7 games for the system, there are 6 people who own only one. At this point in the PS4’s lifespan, it had sold 30 million games.

Now I’m not trying to suggest that Switch software sales will always be 2:1. Throughout it’s lifespan, that will surely go up so it’s not that damning of a number even if it is below what the current market leader is. However, I feel that will go up when hardware sales begin to slow down and Nintendo releases more games. It is damning when you combine it’s hardware/software sales ratio that with the fact that 82% of those sales are Nintendo titles because that an indication of the Switch userbase.

So the majority of those Switch owners with one title own Mario Kart 8, Breath of the Wild, or Mario Odyssey. That likely the case with those who own 2 or 3 games as well. It’s not until you get to the people with 4 Switch games that it becomes statistically likely that one of them is a third-party title. Unless the Switch userbase can become one where third-party and especially multi-plat titles can sell 1 million copies like on other systems then it’s not good in the long run.

I think it’s damning that NBA 2k18 sold to 2-3% of the XBO and PS4’s userbases but only to 0.7% of the Switch’s userbase.

FIFA games, which have a world-wide appeal, sold to 2-3% of Switch players. You could blame that on it only being Switch’s first year on shelves but FIFA sold to 28% of PS4 players in the PS4’s first month. FIFA 14, the newest one available at PS4’s launch, sold over 1.2 million copies in less than 2 months to an install base of 4.4 million PS4 owners. You tell me which platforms are more worth it for EA to release their sports games. And you can’t tell me that that’s a small loss for Nintendo because FIFA 18 is the top selling game this year.

It’s not recovered that quickly. Remember that Nintendo is the one making the highest profits. Microsoft always struggled, Sony struggled for some time.

Hey, I used your numbers for custom SOC costs. $300 million would be made up in about 6 months and I wasn’t factoring in that their first party titles making them a bigger profit.

And it’s not only about money, it’s about time too.

Two years would have been plenty time.

Very customized SoCs takes much time to develop.

I never said it would be highly-customized. You know what I mean. I don’t mean custom ARM cores or Cell processors, I just mean licenced SIP blocks from ARM, ImgTec, CEVA, or whomever configured for the system’s needs. It’s nothing Nintendo hasn’t done a million times before and it’s never seemed to have been the difference between them selling at a loss or not. Between the 3DS and Wii U, they’ve made five.

Instead Nintendo was able to hasten the release of the console before its time (eventually the Wii U was planned to live a few years more).

Switch came out 4.5 years after the Wii U. It’s definitely the shortest-lasting Nintendo console but not far off from the time between the N64 and Gamecube’s launch which was 5 years. Keep in mind that the Gamecube wasn’t a phoned-in console design either. It used a PowerPC process (with Nintendo-maded custom instructions and FPU), a completely custom GPU (was never used in anything else except the Wii), used 1T-SRAM for almost all external memory, and it supported used the GBA (Which they were designing at the exact same time) as controller.

Nope, I’m not suggesting a shift to another manufacture. Nvidia is probably there to stay, though they will eventually develop a SoC that they will offer to other partners.

…did you read the link?

PS4 and XB1 aren’t tablet sized, aren’t hybrid, can’t be used as handhelds. Unfair and useless comparison.

That’s BS reasoning. If the systems gonna call itself a console then you’re allowed to compare it to other consoles whether they’re hybrid or not. The Switch is expected to get console games. You can claim it’s going to inherit all the exlusive third-party support the 3DS got just because this is portable but the 3DS never required console-sized budgets. A game like Bravely Default could be made for the 3DS on a fairly low budget and still be among the most impressive games on the system and it would make back it’s budget fairly easily. X360/PS3 era games can easily cost tens of millions of dollars before marketing costs are factored in.

Nope, I don’t say that the majority of their userbase is on the PC, but they are developed on PC for PC, then ported to consoles.
Nintendo games are developed on PC (still eventually they have also proprietary tools that avoid the PC completely) for consoles.

And that’s completely irrelevant to the topic at hand and ignores the context in which you first said “PC games”. When you first mentioned PC games you said “Switch just won’t get some PC games.” If you were referring to their developement then there would be no reason to specifically label them as “PC games”.

10 times to 47 times. That looks way off.

47 times is when you compare PC sales for GTAV versus all available consoles. If you’re comparing PC to PS4 then it’s still 16x.

http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/?name=grand%20theft%20auto%20V

Far Cry 4 sold 6.3 times more on PS4 than PC.

http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/?name=far%20cry%204

The Assasin’s Creed Origins sold 53 times more copies on PS4 than PC.

http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/?name=assassin%27s+creed

FIFA 18 sold 115x more copies on PS4 than PC.

http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/?name=fifa%2018

30% of The Witcher 3 sales are on PC, the remaining divided between PS3 and Xbox, for example.

Wrong. 12.5% of Witcher 3 sales were on PC. PS4 had the lion’s share with 66% and XBO got he remainder at 21.5%.

http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/?name=witcher+3

The ratio software/hardware will change with time. Give it time. No system has an high software/hardware ratio at start.

I said as much.

There are also digital sales to see. I’m certain that indies are selling like hotcakes over there.

You can’t use indie games to judge third-party support. Even the Wii U had great indie support.

The first userbase of the Nintendo Switch is comprised of Nintendo fans, it’s normal that with that userbase in mind FIFA is struggling, but things will change with time.

Unless you’re from 5 years in the future or possess clairvoyance, there’s no reason for you assume that. What information are you using to judge that the Switch’s userbase will only initially be Nintendo fans but will expand in the future?

Eventually not like other consoles where there aren’t first party games really competitive with third party games.

Other consoles also have first-party games that are competitive with third-party games. Horizon Zero Dawn was the third best selling game this year. It’s a first party Sony title and besides FIFA 18, it was the highest selling game on PS4. As far as the games that have been out for around the same amount of time, it outsold Ghost Recon, Resident Evil VII, and For Honor.

Those consoles will always be a better bet for third party sales (no competition).

Absolutely. That didn’t have to be the case though.

Hybrid system or not, the Switch is in direct competition with the PS4 & Xbox One since it plays console games & those are consoles, so it can still be compared to them on that basis alone. 3rd parties are doing that each time they weigh the pros & cons of porting or making games for Switch.

6 months of what?

Games sales.

Companies do struggle even without custom hardware costs.

And? What’s your point?

Making a SoC isn’t like adding pieces together, some A72, some Volta cores, etc. Engineering isn’t nothing like that.

I never said it was completely drag and drop. Of course there’s some additional work the best done after dropping in the licensed code but it’s not like Nintendo doesn’t have experience doing that. It’s also not like they’re hand wiring billions of transisters in a computer either. SoC’s are compiled with RTL code. CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, display engines, encoding engines, and IO blocks can call be licensed and ARM has an open-standard interconnect specification that many semiconductor IP support. So when you license that IP, it is usually presented to you as RTL code which would allwo you to get an SOC working pretty quick. Of course, you would want to actually do lower level adjustments after that.

It’s not the same to do a 3DS class SoC and a Switch one. Also Wii U possibly borrowed technology from Xbox 360 who knows if it was done from the ground up or just customized for Nintendo.

It didn’t borrow anything from the Xbox 360. The only thing common between them is that they both use three core processors that use the PowerPC instruction set. The Xbox used slight modified PPE cores from the Cell process though while Wii U used a higher clocked tri-core version of the PowerPC 750 which they had been using since the Gamecube. Wii U did borrow the EDRAM cache tech that IBM was using in the Power7 series though.

Designing a “3DS class” SoC and designing something better is very much the same process.

GameCube was done from the ground up, but no one knows how much time it took.

The design of the Gamecube GPU (which included system logic, a memory controller, and DSP) was started in 1998. I’d imagine development time to get something working would have had to have been 2 years or shorter since Factor 5 recieved early protype hardware in mid-2000. Game trailers show first party titles running on GC hardware were shown off at Space World 2000 in August.

Also it’s complexity isn’t anything like a modern SoC.

Of course complexity has gone up, but again, I’m also no suggesting they make something from scratch.

No, it isn’t bs. It’s an hybrid system, you can’t compare it with anything except other hybrid systems. Unless you want to see it as just a console, but it’s not what it is. </b

It's like your forget where this conversation started.

I had said that the Switch invites a double standard that it can't meet because it calls itself a portable and a home console. For clarification, this means that it asks you to compare it as a portable to other portables and as a console to other consoles.

You argued that it did meet that meet both standards perfectly with your rationale being that the standard console experience is 720p30. Here you are saying that its console experience not only compares favorably to other consoles but you went the extra step and suggested it’s a match in that particular metric.

However, I pointed out that the standard experiences on both other consoles (PS4 and XBO) is atleast 900p30 to 1080p30… which is above 720p30.

You then said that’s an irrelevant comparison because Switch isn’t a standard console and that it’s wrong to even expect to compare to other consoles.

In other words: It doesn’t CANNOT meet the double standard it invites.

If you take vgcharts as your comparison tool for sales than it’s obvious you are completely off on numbers. That tells just one part of the story, it does not cover all sales, nor it’s a reliable source. You have to see what the software house say, not an unrelated website.</b

Fair enough. I know there numbers are controversial so I won't use them in our future discussions.

It’s that for any console. First come the fanbase than the rest of the market.

It’s a different story with Nintendo though. Third-party sales have been low on Nintendo consoles for a few generations.

Obviously it can tank like the Xbox but that’s not gonna happen, wanna bet?

Sure, why not.

Wii U got a Zelda game, remasters of two GC era Zelda’s, a 3D Mario game, a New Super Mario Bros game, the first version of Smash to have 8 player battle, Mario Kart 8, and Xenoblade; all in HD for the first time and that sold 13 million units.

Switch released the biggest Zelda game in years, a new sandbox Mario game, a Mario Kart, a Splatoon, a Xenoblade all in its first year so that created a lot of sales momentum and got it to 10 million very quickly. They have a Metroid coming which is a franchise that typically doesn’t sell well but does appeal to a different demographic than other Nintendo games sell it will sell a few systems. Then they have the first home console Pokemon RPG which will be big so that will sell quite a few units. However, it will only be one Pokemon game as opposed to the twin release thing they usually do and the series has sold less over the years with series sales topping out at 31 million for Pokemon Red, Green, and Blue combined. Pokemon will also appeal to people who already have the Switch so I’m gonna say that it’ll push 10 million more Switches though that feels generous.

So… I’m thinking Switch hardware sales will beat Gamecube hands down and maybe reach sell about 30 million over its lifetime. Though I admit that it’s very early to try to predict lifetime sales.

Horizon is one game. Nintendo had like 1 high quality game per month, that’s the difference.

You said that other consoles don’t have first-party titles that sell as well as third-party titles. I pointed out that they do. The problem on Nintendo consoles is that they don’t have third-party titles that sell anywhere near as well as their first party titles. That’s been true for years. They also haven’t had the sports crowd since maybe the N64. My whole point has been about userbases and third party sales.

Trust me, dude. I’ve been on your side of the conversation before.

Seems you want to suggest that first-party games are the biggest contributor to console sales while simultaneously saying that the console with the biggest market share has very few first-party games that don’t sell well.

Sony has the casuals now. Eventually it will begin to change in 2018, when the Switch will have been out for enough time. We will see.

Smart phones have the “casuals” now.

My point is that you are judging Nintendo’s choice without putting yourself in their shoes.

Except that I am. I want Nintendo to be successful, too, and I’m been vocal before in saying that the Switch concept isn’t the way to do that, not in the long term. The Switch simply does not address many of the problems that people and developers had with the Wii U.

If they decided for that SoC it was because it was the perfect choice in that situation.

You REALLY need to stop using the word “perfect” when it clearly doesn’t apply.

And it reflected in sales. They sold somany Switch systems. They got so much money out of it, and that’s what a company is looking for.

Yea, this system is doing better than the Wii U. That’s not a high bar by any means and you’re only looking at one metric. I’m sure Nintendo is ecstatic about the hardware sales and the sales of their own games but even they know that the metric I’m talking about are important. That’s why they reached out to third-parties themselves but they do that all the time with the same results.

Third-party support is based on whether or not the time and cost of supporting your systme is worth it for the amount of money the game can make on your system. That’s why GameCube had excellent third-party support despite poor sales. It didn’t take an enormous amount of effort to port games to the system unless storage space was an issue. That’s why those games were also generally released the same day as other systems and with feature and presentation parity.

Not (just) pleasing everyone (even who does count pixels).

It’s not about pixel-counting it’s about third-party support and not having third-party games looking and performing vastly inferior on your system.

A perfect business decision, like they did with the Game Boy many decades ago.

There you got with “perfect” again. I can’t believe you don’t see the obvious differences between when the Gameboy launched and now. The Gameboy was one of the first handhelds ever created so the idea of having something in your pocket that play a bunch of games was extremely unique unlike now where it’s uncommon not to.

The decision to prioritize battery life was important considering it was sold at a time when batteries were worse and re-chargeable ones weren’t common so having poor battery life would have been very expensive. Even now, that is still important to have good battery life (not something the Switch is superb at and that largely has to do with the SoC) though but we can charge things now.

The original Game Boy, while bulky by todays standards, was still the smallest of the competing handhelds at the time. The Switch is by far the biggest handheld in years and it’s concept prevents it from being able to get smaller.

The original Game Boy was also very affordable while the Switch costs $100 more than competing consoles.

It takes time to build a SoC, we don’t know their timeframe, we don’t know if the Switch was rushed to the market to cope with the Wii U failure (probably yes).

You keep repeating that building an SoC takes times as if I haven’t acknowledge that already. From everything we know about the developement of the Switch, it was 3 years from beginning to end of developement. That’s the same as the Gamecube which again included a 100% custom GPU. I understand that it’s quicker to use a premade SoC but by the time the TX1 was even available to purchase, they had been working on the Switch for about a year.

That three core similarity sound pretty suspicious, also it was a co-work by IBM and AMD, it wasn’t old Flipper technology inside that.

The CPU (which was Gecko in the GC) is exactly what I described it to be. That’s how Wii backward compatablity works on the Wii U. When switched to virtual Wii mode, it drops the clockspeed to 729Mhz and shuts off cores 0 and 2. Most of the Gamecube’s GPU is also included on the Wii U’s GPU. The Wii U’s 32 GB pool of eDRAM is used in place of the 24MB of 1T-SRAM in the Wii. MB and 2MB pools of RAM, which is collectively referred to as Mem 0 and used for kernal code in Wii U mode is just a repurposing of the Flippers texture cache and frame buffer cache. The entirety of the TEV unit was placed into the GPU and they brought back the same ARM core that the Wii used as security processor to reprise it’s role and the same is the case with the DSP. The disk drive and interface and video interface were translated to the Wii U’s interfaces in-hardware. And of course, it a 160 core AMD Radeon GPU with universal shaders for the new games.

Some of this was found out by people who reverse engineered the system for homebrew and other things were told to us as part of an Iwata Asks with the team who designed the MCM (not SoC) in the Wii U.

I’m not saying it’s the same technology but it can be an evolution of it (and cheaper, Xbox 360 SoC design was pretty bold at start), probably nothing took from the ground up.

It’s not an evolution of the Xbox 360’s chip (which was multiple chips at the beginning). The 360’s CPU was 64-bit, in-order, and clocked very high. The Espresso (Wii U’s CPU) and was an evolution of the Gecko which itself was a Nintendo customized version of the 32-bit out-of-order IBM PowerPC 750 that was used in iMacs back in 1997.

Look, I’m a graphics enthusiast like you, but I would have never considered a PS4/XB1. I don’t need a second PC.

And right there you show that you’re not representative of the market because 70 million people have a PS4 now.

While I have considered a completely different hardware. And the market say ‘I am’ 10 millions, in its first 9 months on the market.

I think something got lost in translation there.

Developers are all happy about the Switch.

They’re happy about it because they see it’s selling well and they don’t want to come off as a naysayer to a popular system. Larger studios will all give it some vague compliment and then have some other studio port there game to the platform.

Simply some games can’t run on it, because it’s a system that do two things instead of one and had to renounce on some computational power.

Ding ding ding. I don’t disagree you. The problem is that that’s not a good thing! The most important thing that Nintendo has needed to do for a while now is get third-party support and expand the demographic of people who play their games. What they have made is a system where, even if third parties want to support it because it’s either cost too much, take too long, run like shit, or all three.

Nintendo made the Switch to try to bridge the play styles of Japanese players (who favor portables) and Western gamers (who favor consoles), by making a system that is a decent enough handheld but doesn’t compare favorably as a console. That’s incredibly stupid. One in small island, the other is the rest of the world. The result is that it get some support from Japanese publishers and some support from Western publishers, but the vast majority of larger games are not coming out for it.

I’ll reiterate that, while I know the concept of the Switch requires a bunch of compromises, they compromised it more by picking the SoC they did. There’s no reason why the CPU’s in Qualcomms budget SoCs from the beginning of 2016 should be running circles around a system that calls itself of console in 2017.

Nope, it is selling like the WII. It is selling SO much. Not ‘just better’ than the Wii U.

I don’t think you understand the difference between how things are now and they were then. EVERYTHING sells faster now. Why do you think we constantly hear about movies breaking records and why do you think the PS4, which doesn’t have anything uniquely or special about it, is the fastest selling Sony console of all time? People’s buying habits are different now then they were in 2006 when the Wii launched. Now far more people shop online and far more people pre-order. Hell, smart phones weren’t around when the Wii came out so there wasn’t people using websites to track shipments on their phones when they’re waiting on lines. These things all factor into the speed of sales.

You said it, the GameCube sold POORLY. Why they have always to repeat their mistakes? Nintendo is a different beast from Sony. In fact Switch is actually selling far more than that ‘supported’ console.

Again, you’re thinking really one dimensionally. Video games are business and in the ecosystem that is the video games business, there are a lot of ways to make money and a lot of factors that play into things. Hardware sales are only one of those factors.

We were talking about third-party support and Gamecube was a great example of how they were able to turn that around very quickly by developing a console with developers in mind. They almost un-did all the damage that came as a result of the N64. It didn’t fix the problem of third-party sales though which is something that Nintendo has been struggling with ever since. Part of that was their lack of promotion of third-party games. In the Gamecube’s case, it also had a controller which felt weird to play third-party games on and having the games on your system be the same price as competition is not as impressive as having your games be much cheaper as is the case with PS1. That generation the fact that the PS2 was a DVD player was also a huge driving factor for sales. Then obviously the Wii came out and sold a shit down of hardware but since it was less capable than competing systems, they weren’t able to create an online player base as well as Sony or Microsoft. The PS3 and XBox 360 were able to start selling full retail games through their systems as well as DLC and even themes. Developers were also able to add things to their games via updates like support for voice chat or a new peripheral. The Wii had none of that and simply wasn’t designed to be able to do any of that. Then when the Wii U came out, it had a lot in the box but it most facits it just was playing catch up with other systems.

Basically, I’m saying the same thing I’ve been saying this whole time. Nintendo needs third party sales. Switch is terrible idea to get that. It’s bad strategy in the long term. Convince me otherwise and I’ll change my mind but right now the wheels to this converation are just spinning in place.

The Switch is selling like a hot cake, eventually ‘size’ does not matter that much.

Don’t try to market to me. Make an argument.

The Switch cost is high, it would have been higher with a newly designed SoC.

Not really. Every system has an initial investment whether R & D or something else that they make up with the initial revenue of the system. Let me yet again list what’s in the TX1 that the Switch isn’t using.

8 ARM A53 cores (ARM charges licensing fees per core and I believe charges for the interface that connects the big.Little configuration)
6 1.5Gbps MIPI-CSI interfaces (for cameras)
2 4K image signal processors (for resizing, noise reduction, lens distortion correct, color tone mapping for video and stills)
4K h.264, h.265, VP8, VP9, and Motion JPEG codecs
4K HDMI interface
4K MIPI-DSI interface
4K DisplayPort interface
10-bit Dual-screen display controller
SATA2 interface

What ever Nvidia is paying for manufacturing and licensing cost is being covered by Nintendo when they purchase the chip plus Nvidia is making a profit on top of that. If Nintendo made there own SoC, it would not only save them the money that would ordinarily go to Nvidia, but they could remove the things I listed or pair down these things to their needs and get a significantly smaller chip even without changing the manufacturing process. So despite the initial investment, the actual amount they spend per SoC could easily go down. I believe somebody once asserted that Nvidia is selling TX1’s to Nintendo at about $40 a pop. Nvidia’s likely making about $10 in profit off each sale. Assuming the Nintendo could make an SoC that’s even $5 cheaper to produce and assuming they’re already making about $40 on each system that means they would have paid off SOC costs at 5.4 million units sold and made $15 more profit on every system after that.

Lets do that math.

Using TX1: $40 profit per system x 10,000,000 systems sold = $400,000,000 in profit
Using custom SOC: $55 profit per system x 10,000,000 systems sold = $550,000,000 in profit – $300,000,000 in SOC costs = $250,000,000 in profit

Sounds pretty damning for my argument but look what happens at 20 million sold.

Using TX1: $40 profit per system x 20,000,000 systems sold = $800,000,000 in profit
Using custom SOC: $55 profit per system x 20,000,000 systems sold = $1,000,000,000 in profit – $300,000,000 in SOC costs = $800,000,000 in profit

Obviously it becomes a net positive after that.

Using TX1: $40 profit per system x 30,000,000 systems sold = $1,200,000,000 in profit
Using custom SOC: $55 profit per system x 30,000,000 systems sold = $1,650,000,000 in profit – $300,000,000 in SOC costs = $1,350,000,000 in profit

Obviously, a custom SOC could see other advantages as would manufacturing on a 16nm process. For example, they could conceivably included some DP 1.2 over USB 3 logic into the SoC and saved having a separate chip and the power and heat reduction brought by a die shrink would require a smaller battery and possibly less aggressive cooling which saves money as well.

I understand that everything I’m saying there just sounds like strange speculation to you but I’m trying to explain to you how many variables are at play and how sometimes more money spent means more money earned.

Those aren’t high numbers for Sony: PS2 was 155, PS1 was 102. The console market is shrinking without Nintendo.

Again you’re looking at things one-dimensionally.

The PS1 sold 102 million over 12 years. A fantastic start.

The PS2 sold 155 million over 13 years. A fantastic increase.

The PS3 sold 87 million units in 11 years. A notable decrease.

The PS4 sold 70.6 million units in 4 years so far. If it sells at this same or similar same rate for the next two years then it will reach about 88 million by year 5 and about 105 million by year 6 which would put it in line with the original PlayStation.

At this point, the PS4 and PS3 outsold every Nintendo console except for the Wii and the PS2 and PS1 outsold the Wii.

Those 70 millions eventually prefer a PS4 more than a PC, looks like many will skip that console.

What?

It’s not good? Relative. It’s good if you put it in perspective: The Switch is a portable too and people can take the console with them on their journeys.

We’re you just the guy trying to claim the console market was shrinking and now you’re saying that it’s portability is going to bring it to Wii levels of success? Nintendo has completely ruled the handheld market for forever but each one they sold, with the except of the DS, as sold less than the previous.

Game Boy (original + color + light + pocket) = 118.69 million units

Game Boy Advance (original + SP + micro) = 81.51 million units

Nintendo DS (original + Lite + DSi + DSi XL) = 154.02 million units

Nintendo 3DS (original + XL + New 3DS + 3DS XL + 2DS + New 2DS XL) = 68.98 million units

I’ll point out yet again that Nintendo handhelds were typically at a price point where people would collect newer iterations of the systems as well as color and themed variants. That’s not going to happen with a $300 system.

Those people are willing to miss some computational power to have that chance. As the market shows they are many.

So 10 million people is a lot of people but 70 million isn’t? We knew there was at last 10 million Nintendo die-hards willing to buy a system to play Nintendo games, that’s what the Wii U told us, but how much further will that go without major third-party games? As I said, a little over 80% of Switch software sales have been Nintendo games. Those Nintendo games aren’t on any other systems so how does that tell us anything about the markets willingness to miss out on computation power? Again, you’re looking at this one-dimensionally.

Nintendo want to develop on one platform, want to consolidate its business. I think it’s a very good thing to do.

I agree whole heartedly but that doesn’t mean you have to have one system. I told you before that if Nintendo had two systems: a handheld and home console, and the console had a scaled up version of the handhelds SoC then developing for both those consoles would be identical to developing for the Switch. The only difference would be that you can way scale better than one device could.

They bought the SoC and the software provided by nVidia, the best package on the market.

Again, that’s BS that you’re saying just because nVidia is a brand that you know. The fact is that every GPU design company offers there own set of tools for profiling and game development. When it comes to Nvidia GameWorks, that’s also available on the PS4, Wii U, and Xbox One which all use AMD chips so it’s not something you need Nvidia chips for. PhysX has been available to consoles since the PS2. NVN is likely Vulkan + Nvidia extensions but every GPU company has their own extensions.

Then when it comes to judging the TX1 on pure performance, it’s by no means best on the market anymore. It held that crown for 3 months back in 2015. Qualcomm and Samsung SoCs are doing performing very similarly to the TX1 in smaller, more-cooling limited, battery-limited environments. Still, a custom SoC would have been a better option in the long run for Nintendo.

Also I just want to ask where you got that $300 million number to make an SoC. The Cell processor was made from scratch for $400 million. Why would a semi-custom chip using ready-made, licensable, semiconductor IP blocks cost anywhere near that amount? The amount of money you claim it costs is 1/3rd of the Mediatek’s Net income.

Wii U followed GC path, it got great third party support at start, but then it was abandoned because of abysmal hardware sales. They don’t need to repeat history, they need to success.

Wii U and GC are two different stories. Both had poor third-party sales, but GC kept it’s support while Wii U didn’t. This has to do with the Wii U’s specs versus the time it came out. For about a year, the only other consoles on the market were PS3 and Xbox 360.

We don’t know if ‘another SoC’ has the same software package of the other one, we don’t know the actual price in comparison, etc. NVidia listed it just for automotive (at least it was listed like that, don’t know now), eventually there is a reason for it.

What exactly are you referring to when you say “software package”?

I bet they have done what was right for them, and then for us. It’s speculation, I’m happy for numbers but than Nintendo has to do real business decisions, and they know what to do and why.

Right, they know exactly what sells hardware which exactly why their last console and handheld were the worst selling hardware in their history.