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Soundwave on 19 April 2017
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RolStoppable said:
Soundwave said:

No one's putting a gun to your head and saying you have to post in a thread about Switch hardware and future Tegra chipsets if that doesn't interest you. 

Secondly, we can't rule out anything. 

Third, if Switch is popular you can assume there likely will inevitably be tablet knock offs. 

There is no such thing as a hugely successful product in this industry that isn't copied eight ways to Tuesday. 

It's not just graphics it's the overall scope of the experience, Switch needs to maintain the ability to be credible as a home console. Right now it can do that, but 2 generations is a lot. Even the Wii would have suffered some if Nintendo had used a souped up N64 chip (two generations behind a PS3/360). You want to keep the gap at least at one generation.

Beyond all that, model iterations make companies money. It's why they're all doing it and it's not going to stop any time soon. 

And again, comparing to 3DS just makes the whole thing moot, 3DS never had to carry the entire Nintendo franchise catalog, if it did certain games like Splatoon wouldn't really even possible without huge compromises because the hardware is so badly out of date. 

Switch is a very different product from the 3DS and will have different expectations brought upon its shoulders.

There is one kind of successful product in the video game market that scares everyone else: The portable Nintendo console. Not even the PlayStation brand could compete, so your assertion that Nintendo should be worried about tablet knockoffs is preposterous. The reason why Nintendo is this unbeatable juggernaut in the dedicated portable gaming market is that Nintendo has the best first party by far and nobody has been able to assemble third parties to put their best content on portables which makes the competition in the handheld market about who has the best first party. That's why the result in the handheld market has always been the same: Nintendomination.

Switch is plenty credible as a home gaming system to people who do not value graphics highly, and that's the majority of video game consumers.

I am not arguing that there will be no revisions for Switch. I am saying that revisions will tackle questions like battery life and size/form, but not processing power. There's no good reason why Nintendo should increase the number of graphics settings that need to be accounted for when developing Switch software.


Switch is its own thing too. 

Also when you do get to PS3/360/Wii U tier graphics at least for now, there is definitely still a certain decent wow factor to that level of graphics for today. That is giving the Switch a lot of it's "wow", because quite frankly there's never been a game that looks like Zelda and has the scope of Zelda playable on the go like that. 

To maintain that advantage, I would say yes, absolutely Nintendo would want to likely improve the chip at some point, especially so they don't fall 2 generations behind. If you start getting mobile games that have equal/better graphics to Switch games, even if they're just a few it devalues the Switch concept. Even worse some devs might inevitably want to port Switch games to mobile as mobile chips get more powerful, just saying "well we have buttons" doesn't excite people. Visual performance does matter. The Switch would not be selling nearly as well if its Zelda looked like a game that's 2 generations behind modern console gaming like this:

Even if it was a great, great game ... that's not something someone today looks at and goes "wow! I need to pre-order that as soon as possible!". The Switch concept doesn't work.

The Switch is suceeding because it's going upmarket from even the 3DS and offering big experiences that people are not accustomed to on a portable device (yes even the 3DS). Experiences that until now they would only expect from a real home console. And that's needed today because smartphones/tablets dominate the lower tier/budget area of portable gaming. Nintendo has to go upstream with a much higher end experience to justify why people should consider buying their product. Just having buttons and badly dated graphics doesn't cut it -- the 3DS over the last three years had the lowest shipments for Nintendo portable hardware over the last 20 years, buttons wasn't saving it. 

Once PS5 rolls around circa 2020, you're going to want a hardware refresh to stay within a generation IMO, so you can maintain the Switch's position as the defacto high end portable experience (by a big margin) and also stay well clear of any smartphone games.