What would happen/need to happen if/for the Switch became the dominant platform?

[Pemalite]

Bandorr said:

What a very strange question.
The Xbox 360 was the most "powerful" for that generation I believe.
PS4 4 was the most powerful (for a while) of this generation.

The switch isn't even as powerful as the base ps4.. but you are asking this question after the PS5 and XSX come out?
Plus how can it be the dominant platform when it isn't even getting those games?

Can you imagine Cyberpunk running on the switch? It would have to require every game do what control did.

The Xbox 360 was beaten by the Playstation 3 in terms of power.
Power is only part of the equation however.

Dulfite said:

Well I think 3rd parties would be happy because they could cut development costs by primarily making the games for weaker devices with some upscaled benefits (on the cheap) for Xbox/PS. Right now they produce very expensive games for those two and then dumb them down for Switch, but do it backwards and they now spend less to develop the games. The only people that would be bothered are the 1% of gamers that care about water reflections looking pretty.

It's actually rather expensive to innovate and invent new methods to make lower-end hardware truly shine visually... Often artists go back and "bake" details like lighting, shadowing or other micro-detailing into the art work, which can take significant development time and resources... But has the added benefit of no extra hardware overhead like dynamic details.

Just because your platform has more performance, doesn't mean it's lengthier or more expensive to develop for, often many new rendering techniques actually saves development time... Case in point, Tessellation where you can use that technique to automate geometric complexity of models rather than having artists/programmers do the entire work then optimizing the entire pipeline.

An example was Ori and the Will of the Wisps... The developers had to go back to the game and completely overhaul the entire rendering pipeline to make the game more efficient for the Switch, which took months of development time and testing.
They of-course forwarded those optimizations to the Xbox version of course, but it wasn't necessary as the Xbox could brute force it all.