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potato_hamster on 05 January 2018
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captain carot said:
potato_hamster said:
Wait, wait, wait. Back this truck up. Why is anyone even thinking it's even remotely possible, much less plauible or likely that Nintendo is going to release a newer, much more powerful Switch just 2.5 years max after the original came out?

Sure, you'll probably get a Switch Lite, or Switch-i, or something to perhaps offer home mode in portable form, and improve the battery life significantly. Just like they did for pretty much all of their older generations of handhelds. Why are we now expecting something different out of Nintendo

Basically Tegra gives Nintendo the possibility for an Xbox like approach, being forward compatible but having higher res/more fx and better textures etc. on a Switch 'Pro'.

And DSi as well as New 3DS were improved variants with more RAM and higher CPU-clock. So Nintendo has done more powerful variants before and Tegra makes a more powerful version of Switch pretty easy in the near future.

I really think though that they go for lower price and longer battery life first.

Perhaps I was unclear. We know the technology was there. Tegra 2 was out well before the Switch came out - with a Tegra 1 processor. But why would they bother? The DSi and New 3DS are marginal improvements at best (Sony did the same with PSP and PSV revisions), and the experiment of "New 3DS exclusive games" was a disaster and very quickly dropped.


I think it's patently ridiculous to think that not only is Nintendo strongly considering a "Switch Pro" that's significantly more powerful than the original switch, but that they're definitely going to do it less than two years after the release of the original Switch. That's completely insane. Just think of third parties (and if you think third parties are of little relevance, and don't do much to make a platform desirable - first party titles couldn't save the Wii U) Nintendo is looking at what Sony and MS is doing with their Pro and X variants and noticing what I predicted when these consoles were first announced - these consoles do little more than give third party developers more work to do with zero expectation that the investment leads to higher game sales. The vast majority of third party developers do the bare minimum for X/Pro compatibility because it's not worth the effort. Nintendo has historically had a hard enough time attracting third parties to their platforms, and has an even harder time keeping these third parties on their platforms due to struggling sales. A Switch Pro makes developing a game for the Switch that much more expensive, when third parties are already expecting lower sales. Where is the benefit, exactly?

On top of that, due to the reasons I mentioned above amongst others,  the PS4 Pro and X1X aren't the hits many predicted them to be, and I wouldn't be shocked at all if this "1.5" console concept is dropped from future console generations. It's quite plausible that these half platforms will never bring a positive return on the investments they required and continue to require, and now Nintendo of all companies is going to jump on that bandwagon? Come on man.


I don't think you're going to see a significantly more powerful Switch. However, as I mentioned previously, I do see them leveraging improvements in technology to give the Switch improved battery life, or a higher resolution screen (or both) similar to what Nintendo has done in the past with the DSi, and New 3DS. That's what Nintendo has done before, and I don't see any reason why they would break the mold.