-Price: Exactly the same as the basic Wii U at launch. Comparing it to the PS4 is disingenuous as it is a 4 year old console [1], it is £100 cheaper than the PS4 Pro deals currently on Amazon. Who are 'most people'? This article implies that it is the expected price point [2]: http://time.com/4632820/nintendo-switch-nx/.
-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.
Storage is really a non-issue. You can get enough space for 10 AAA-quality games (presumably 25GB each) for $80: http://amzn.to/2iPJOja (Ironically, it's a Sony product...)
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 battery life is bad, but I'm not that surprised by it. Current phone/tablets achieve a lot of their battery longevity by throttling performance, this is something that is not really acceptable when your device is a games console first.
I can only imagine that if an iPad mini had to run a program as intensive as the upcoming Zelda appears to be that its battery life would also suffer.
The Switch GPU does clock down to 307MHz when undocked. In docked mode, it can run at 768MHz, about 2.5x faster. CPU and memory speeds are unaffected.
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.
Absolutely agree. This whole presentation just shown that Nintendo excels at killing good hype. I know several people(including me) who were going to preorder today as soon as they could, but after the news dropped about the price and how late the games are going to arrive, no one did. I work at a large games publisher, sitting in the office full of people who are full-on gaming enthusiasts, and I haven't yet met a single person who is not disappointed by that presentation.
"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.
In the context of a discussion about Nintendo, the PSP can't be called successful, though.
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.
> Plus as I understand it, very few games even now fill a DVD, let alone fill a Bluray.
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.
The WiiU already supported Downloading Games from their store, i'd expect this to be able to do the same, the question is just how big of an SD Card you want to cram in there.
That's what I don't get. With only 32GB of storage Nintendo is not making it easy to go all digital which is something that they should want to do as they get a bigger cut when people buy directly from them.
> battery life: potentially only 2.5 hours? Really not good enough for a handheld.
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.
From the presentation. They mentioned it was 2.5 to 6, but expect worst case with battery life. You can plug a USB-C to charge it with a power bank from what I gather.
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.
Yep, the Nintendo 3DS came with a 1750 mAh battery and that lasted for 3-5 hours. Get a small power bank or a 10,000 mAh one and you're set for the whole day. I don't think battery is too much of a problem.
Yup, agreed. I have a big powerbank i use for everything at home and i see no reason to increase the bulk of the Switch itself to include a bigger battery.
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.
Funny, I thought the price was really cheap, I was more worried about the relatively high prices on accessories.
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.
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).
Err, if you follow through, it's a movie, not a game. The cheapest console+game on the top link is 230, and most are 250. These are also the previous generation of the PS4.
Do you really need more than 2.5 hours of battery power? I can imagine myself playing on the dock in the morning, taking the train and using the battery for 1 hour, working/school, taking the train with the battery for 1 more hour and then dock it back on.
Um, yes? 2.5 hours is terrible. Besides a daily commute, many flights are more than 1 hour. Also, it'd be nice to not have my device die immediately if I forgot to charge it three times a day.
I've flown hundreds of times in my life and never been on a plane which had power or usb sockets. Airbus 320/Boeing 737 don't tend to be equipped with them.
Sorry, but that's just impossible, really. Any sufficiently long flight, especially international, ALWAYS has power connectors and/or USB slots. Admittedly the power plug is often hard to find, hidden under the seat or armrest, but the USB slots are usually right below the heads up screen for movies. Unless you're flying extremely short distances only, power is basically included in all flights at this point. This applies to coach as well.
Ok,let's have a game. Take any European flight with Ryanair, Easyjet or Jet2.com. If you find yourself on a plane with USB or power outlets,I will happily refund your flight in entirety. Like I said,I have flown hundreds of times(20-30 times a year for about 5 years), only with those airlines, all flights were about 2-3 hours long, and not a single one of them had USB/power sockets.
You're definitely not looking hard enough then. Like I said, they are typically hiding somewhere under the seats. There is NO WAY a super common flight like LA to NY does not have power.
I'm on a plane at least once a month with Delta and American Airlines and even small regional jets tend to have USB plugs or power outlets. It may be hidden under the seat or in the arm rest, but what they're saying is true. Most if not all airplanes have power available.
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...