“In a sense, Nintendo is the victim of its own strategic foresight. With the Switch, it was the first to spot that the narrowing gap in processing power between mobile and at-home devices had enabled a unification of handheld and home gaming experiences.”
I was out after this. This is patently wrong. Crucially, Nintendo capitalised on the failure of the vita using the exact same strategy but with a caveat: 3rd party memory cards.
The PSVita had the power to play former gen games in a compact format and MUCH better connectivity than the switch. It failed on the stupid memory cards. Nintendo did not. That’s pretty much it. Sony had the AAA handheld market with the PSP and blew it. I’d be very surprised if something like this wasn’t uttered by an MBA regard in sony’s corpo structure:
“If we divide our playerbase between handheld and dedicated living room console too much it will damage our business”.
So instead of capitalising on a massive library of games that could easily have been ported to a handheld format (the PS4 had 1,4TFlops, we’ve surpased that on mobile before the PS5 launched) SONY decided to double down on AAA and subsequently in live service games, and here we are…
If someone can create a handheld AAA console is a team lead by mark cerny with the support of AMD. To this day I don’t know how we end up with PS portal instead…
So here we are, Sony carved out a niche (AAA and fidelity) from the Nintendo handheld success, and just decided to sit on their hands with it. There was exactly 0 foresight from Nintendo. They knew from the beginning the living room was lost to either MS or Sony to begin with.
Nintendo got to the Switch via the Wii U and through the realization that they could package similar hardware with affordable off-the-shelf parts and still drive a TV output that was competitive with their “one-gen-old-with-a-gimmick” model for home consoles.
It was NOT a handheld with AAA games, it was a home console you could take with you. That is how they got to a point where all the journalists, reviewers and users that spent the Vita’s lifetime wondering who wanted to play Uncharted on a portable were over the moon with a handheld Zelda instead.
So yeah, turns out the read the article has is actually far closer to what happened than yours, I’m sorry to say.
Yes, that’s why they took an ARM based Tegra (like the vita with the powerVR from imagination tech) unlike the in-house wiiu tech… Why look at evidence when we can ignore it and just BS to defend my fav plastic box maker…
Also, the WiiU is basically the PSP remote play in one package, 6y later…
C’mon man, do Nintendo fanboys really have to ape Apple fanboys for everything. Next thing you’re going to tell me how palworld should be sued to the ground…
They took the Tegra because it was sitting in some Nvidia warehouse and they could get it for cheap, or at least get it manufactured for cheap. At least that’s what the grapevine says about how that came together. It does fit Nintendo’s MO of repurposing older, affordable parts in new ways.
I always get a kick of being called a Nintendo fanboy. For one thing, I don’t fanboy. Kids fanboy, and I haven’t been one of those in ages. I don’t root for operating systems or hardware. I don’t even root for sports teams.
For another, back when I was a kid I was a Sega kid. My first Nintendo console was a Gamecube. I was an adult at that point. As a teenager I had a Saturn. I stand by that choice to this day. Better game library than the Dreamcast. Fight me.
But that doesn’t change what happened. The Wii U bombed extremely hard, but there was certainly something to the idea of flipping screens. The Switch is ultimately a tweaked Nvidia Shield and little else. The R&D around it clearly went into seamlessly switching the output from handheld to TV and the controllers from attached to detached. And you know what? They killed it on that front. People don’t give enough thought to how insane it is that the Switch not only seamlessly changes outputs when docked, but it also overclocks its GPU in real time and switches video modes to flip resolution, typically in less time than it takes the display to detect the new input and show it onscreen.
It’s extremely well tuned, too. If you hear devs talk about it, in most cases it takes very little tuning to match docked and handheld performance because the automatic overclock is designed to match the resolution scale.
The Switch didn’t succeed (and the Wii U didn’t fail) at random. Similar as some of the concepts at play are, the devil is in the detail. Nintendo sucks at many things, but they got this right. Competitors stepping into this hybrid handheld space ignore those details at their peril, and that includes the Switch 2.
At least that’s what the grapevine says about how that came together.
This is when I stopped reading because this is demonstrably false. The 214 scratches the Cortex 53 cores and is semi-custom hardware. That also ignores the obvious deal to cheapen the Tegras, which was basically handing NVIDIA the Chinese market on a silver platter, which Nintendo really didn’t cater at all…
AMD had nothing low power/long battery to offer but the jaguar at the time, so Nintendo had to deal with one of the most hated companies in order to get a competitive mobile chip, rather than doing it in-house with licensed off the shelf ARM chips like before. They took a page from SONY and went with a custom GPU based solution, but lacking a solid hardware department (AMD did a lot of the heavy lifting over the years) they just went with NVIDIA because there was almost no other game in town at that price (see Chinese market above, no one else was trying to get into streaming for the Chinese market and needed a strong game library).
That’s it
Edit: regarding output switching… You must be using an apple phone and never heard of MHL… Jesus… It’s like with Apple fans, shit exists for a decade but they honestly think it was Apple that came up with it. M8, and let’s not start with the joycons, they are pretty shit, prone to failure and the design is so garbage that even Nintendo spent R&D not to use that trash sliding mechanism again…
I would recommend continuing to read, then. Or re-reading. None of the detail you provided contradicts what I said at any point.
In fact, the ultimate takeaway is exactly the same. Feel free to substitute all that detail at the point where you “stopped reading” and keep going from there. It’s as good a response as you’re going to get from me.
Although, since you’re going to be anal about the historical detail, it’s incorrect that Nintendo “didn’t cater at all” the Chinese market, they had a presence there through the iQue brand all the way up to the 3DS and these days they ship the Switch there directly through Tencent. I wasn’t in the room to know what the deal with Nvidia was. I have to assume the Shield ports were both low hanging fruit and some part of it, but I seriously doubt it was a fundamental part of the deal to not compete with them there, considering that it took them like two years after the Switch launch and just one after they stopped running their own operation to partner up with Tencent. You’d think “handing the Chinese market on a silver platter” would include some noncompete clause to prevent that scenario.
In any event, we seem to agree that Nvidia was the most affordable partner that could meet the spec without making the hardware themselves. So… yeah, like I said, feel free to get to the actual point if you want to carry on from there.
The Vita had far more problems than just memory cards. You came very close to identifying what the real problem was, Sony couldn’t sustain supporting two separate platforms at once. And conversely, Nintendo unifying onto a single platform was what saved the Switch.
I was out after this. This is patently wrong. Crucially, Nintendo capitalised on the failure of the vita using the exact same strategy but with a caveat: 3rd party memory cards.
The PSVita had the power to play former gen games in a compact format and MUCH better connectivity than the switch. It failed on the stupid memory cards. Nintendo did not. That’s pretty much it. Sony had the AAA handheld market with the PSP and blew it. I’d be very surprised if something like this wasn’t uttered by an MBA regard in sony’s corpo structure:
“If we divide our playerbase between handheld and dedicated living room console too much it will damage our business”.
So instead of capitalising on a massive library of games that could easily have been ported to a handheld format (the PS4 had 1,4TFlops, we’ve surpased that on mobile before the PS5 launched) SONY decided to double down on AAA and subsequently in live service games, and here we are…
If someone can create a handheld AAA console is a team lead by mark cerny with the support of AMD. To this day I don’t know how we end up with PS portal instead…
So here we are, Sony carved out a niche (AAA and fidelity) from the Nintendo handheld success, and just decided to sit on their hands with it. There was exactly 0 foresight from Nintendo. They knew from the beginning the living room was lost to either MS or Sony to begin with.
Nah, this is pretty bad analysis.
Nintendo got to the Switch via the Wii U and through the realization that they could package similar hardware with affordable off-the-shelf parts and still drive a TV output that was competitive with their “one-gen-old-with-a-gimmick” model for home consoles.
It was NOT a handheld with AAA games, it was a home console you could take with you. That is how they got to a point where all the journalists, reviewers and users that spent the Vita’s lifetime wondering who wanted to play Uncharted on a portable were over the moon with a handheld Zelda instead.
So yeah, turns out the read the article has is actually far closer to what happened than yours, I’m sorry to say.
Yes, that’s why they took an ARM based Tegra (like the vita with the powerVR from imagination tech) unlike the in-house wiiu tech… Why look at evidence when we can ignore it and just BS to defend my fav plastic box maker…
Also, the WiiU is basically the PSP remote play in one package, 6y later…
C’mon man, do Nintendo fanboys really have to ape Apple fanboys for everything. Next thing you’re going to tell me how palworld should be sued to the ground…
They took the Tegra because it was sitting in some Nvidia warehouse and they could get it for cheap, or at least get it manufactured for cheap. At least that’s what the grapevine says about how that came together. It does fit Nintendo’s MO of repurposing older, affordable parts in new ways.
I always get a kick of being called a Nintendo fanboy. For one thing, I don’t fanboy. Kids fanboy, and I haven’t been one of those in ages. I don’t root for operating systems or hardware. I don’t even root for sports teams.
For another, back when I was a kid I was a Sega kid. My first Nintendo console was a Gamecube. I was an adult at that point. As a teenager I had a Saturn. I stand by that choice to this day. Better game library than the Dreamcast. Fight me.
But that doesn’t change what happened. The Wii U bombed extremely hard, but there was certainly something to the idea of flipping screens. The Switch is ultimately a tweaked Nvidia Shield and little else. The R&D around it clearly went into seamlessly switching the output from handheld to TV and the controllers from attached to detached. And you know what? They killed it on that front. People don’t give enough thought to how insane it is that the Switch not only seamlessly changes outputs when docked, but it also overclocks its GPU in real time and switches video modes to flip resolution, typically in less time than it takes the display to detect the new input and show it onscreen.
It’s extremely well tuned, too. If you hear devs talk about it, in most cases it takes very little tuning to match docked and handheld performance because the automatic overclock is designed to match the resolution scale.
The Switch didn’t succeed (and the Wii U didn’t fail) at random. Similar as some of the concepts at play are, the devil is in the detail. Nintendo sucks at many things, but they got this right. Competitors stepping into this hybrid handheld space ignore those details at their peril, and that includes the Switch 2.
This is when I stopped reading because this is demonstrably false. The 214 scratches the Cortex 53 cores and is semi-custom hardware. That also ignores the obvious deal to cheapen the Tegras, which was basically handing NVIDIA the Chinese market on a silver platter, which Nintendo really didn’t cater at all…
AMD had nothing low power/long battery to offer but the jaguar at the time, so Nintendo had to deal with one of the most hated companies in order to get a competitive mobile chip, rather than doing it in-house with licensed off the shelf ARM chips like before. They took a page from SONY and went with a custom GPU based solution, but lacking a solid hardware department (AMD did a lot of the heavy lifting over the years) they just went with NVIDIA because there was almost no other game in town at that price (see Chinese market above, no one else was trying to get into streaming for the Chinese market and needed a strong game library).
That’s it
Edit: regarding output switching… You must be using an apple phone and never heard of MHL… Jesus… It’s like with Apple fans, shit exists for a decade but they honestly think it was Apple that came up with it. M8, and let’s not start with the joycons, they are pretty shit, prone to failure and the design is so garbage that even Nintendo spent R&D not to use that trash sliding mechanism again…
I would recommend continuing to read, then. Or re-reading. None of the detail you provided contradicts what I said at any point.
In fact, the ultimate takeaway is exactly the same. Feel free to substitute all that detail at the point where you “stopped reading” and keep going from there. It’s as good a response as you’re going to get from me.
Although, since you’re going to be anal about the historical detail, it’s incorrect that Nintendo “didn’t cater at all” the Chinese market, they had a presence there through the iQue brand all the way up to the 3DS and these days they ship the Switch there directly through Tencent. I wasn’t in the room to know what the deal with Nvidia was. I have to assume the Shield ports were both low hanging fruit and some part of it, but I seriously doubt it was a fundamental part of the deal to not compete with them there, considering that it took them like two years after the Switch launch and just one after they stopped running their own operation to partner up with Tencent. You’d think “handing the Chinese market on a silver platter” would include some noncompete clause to prevent that scenario.
In any event, we seem to agree that Nvidia was the most affordable partner that could meet the spec without making the hardware themselves. So… yeah, like I said, feel free to get to the actual point if you want to carry on from there.
The Vita had far more problems than just memory cards. You came very close to identifying what the real problem was, Sony couldn’t sustain supporting two separate platforms at once. And conversely, Nintendo unifying onto a single platform was what saved the Switch.