Will the Switch ever get a Direct competitor?

[Bofferbrauer2]

fatslob-:O said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

1. Not every country have such data plans

2. The bigger the resolution the higher the data consumption. With a PS4 equivalent you could already count close to 15-20GB instead of the 5GB for Switch hardware.

3. The prices for these plans. Verizon's above unlimited costs 95$ per month, while Sprint's unlimited premium is still 90$. That's way above what most people would be willing to pay. Add to this the price of you subscription and you would easily be at 120$ per month or 1440$ per year. That's just nuts.

1. I don't see why it couldn't be better in other countries since delivering mobile connectivity coverage in Europe or East Asia is not as geographically challenging as it is North America which need far more cell towers to service less population dense areas ... 

2. Game streaming only needs like 5 Mbps for a passable experience ... (~2GB/hr) 

3. Prices for these plans aren't that amazing but it'll get better once 5G rolls out in a couple of years and the landscape will definitely become more competitive between mobile network operators in the coming years ... 

With all that being said, 2G and 3G are becoming obsolete in the developed markets and there will only be 4G LTE (only fallback) or 5G but what's more is that even the likes of Verizon themselves is entering the game streaming market! 

1. You are only counting rich countries there. In those countries, you're right, that shouldn't be a problem, except maybe some rare cases. However, countries outside of the top 20-30 richest countries do have less developed infrastructure, and thus much worse conditions for game streaming, both due to data limitations, but also ping.

2. Yeah, yeah, I could see that myself with Playstation Now - not. Under 8Mbps the visual quality was more at PSP level. Thankfully, I had 30Mbit which made PS3 games at least look like PS3 games, but with the 8Mbps at my dad's place it took a very serious visual hit, and that just wasn't worth it for me. Also, keep in mind that the 5mbps (which in Sony's own terms need to be rock-solid and rather suggest up to 12mbps to make sure) and 3GB/h Sony publicized for Playstation Now is just enough for 720p30. 1080p is twice as big as 720p,which means 1080p60 would at least need 4 times as much bandwith and data so 20mbps and 12GB/h for 1080p60

3. Prices will get cheaper, but certainly not as fast as you seem to think. It took forever to get high data cap plans with LTE and these are unpayable as you can see yourself.

I also checked what the prices would be in Germany (Telekom), Luxembourg (Tango), France (Orange) and found that they are wildly different. Telekom has an unlimited Data subscription plan... but that's needed since the next-lower one only gives 10GB. Tango doesn't have any unlimited data plan and even their biggest one is capped at 44GB (free wifi is relatively commonplace in the city of Luxembourg, but if you live in outside the city, you're pretty much out of luck here). Orange is pretty good and cheap, but not unlimited. Just to show you that plans like the ones you posted are not universal in the industrial world.

Last edited by Bofferbrauer2 - on 21 February 2019