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curl-6 on 08 October 2017
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Pemalite said:
curl-6 said:

Wasn't that the original position of my "goalposts" though? That there has never been room for 3 similar consoles? I don't think I ever said there's never been room for 3 at all; there is as long as they're not all fighting for the same audience. Wii and Switch are different enough that they can co-exist with the others without directly clashing.

They are similar in that they were all fixed dedicated home consoles, which is what I assumed you were pertaining to as the Switch doesn't fall into that category but the Wii does.

curl-6 said:

I admit I'm no expert on APIs but it seems to me that one that was to work on numerous platforms won't be quite as low level as one custom tailored to a single platform, in the same way a suit that has to fit 100 different guys won't fit as well as one that was measured and tailored just for me?

Nope, they are all as low-level as each other.

That doesn't mean NVN/Switch isn't doing things Metal/iOS couldn't...
I mean, Microsoft offloaded the handling of draw calls from the CPU and threw it onto the command processor on the GPU for instance which is something that can only be reliably achieved in a fixed hardware environment... But that doesn't make NVN a lower level API that say Metal, it just exposes different features and does a few things differently.

I meant "similar" more in the sense that the PS3/360, PS4/Xbone, or PS2/Xbox/GCN are similar. Wii with its focus on motion controls and simpler, accessible games instead of the HD AAA titles that defined PS3/360 was different enough from the competition that it carved out its own market. Switch is doing the same by offering a very different experience to PS4/Xbone. Whenever you have 3 platforms that are quite similar and compete directly, one or more of them are unsuccessful. (E.g. Xbox/GCN, Saturn)

And okay, fair enough, I'll rephrase my comment.