Soundwave said:
Playstation's recently retired president Shu Yoshida is confused by Nintendo opting to make a powerful, spec-focused Switch 2 instead of a cheapo gimmicky console, lol. https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/nintendo-is-losing-their-identity-shuhei-yoshida-says-switch-2s-focus-on-power-is-what-other-companies-would-do/
"To me it was a bit [of a] mixed message from Nintendo," Yoshida explained. "In a sense, I think Nintendo is losing their identity, in my opinion. For me they are always about creating some new experience, like designing hardware and games together to create something, [an] amazing new experience.
"But Switch 2, as we all anticipated, is a better Switch, right? It's the larger screen, more powerful processor, higher resolution, 4K 120fps. They even had a hardware person starting the stream, like other platforms do, right?
"And because it's a better Switch, the core premise of the whole Switch 2 is 'we made things better', and that's something other companies have been doing all the time."
Yoshida added that while the idea of a Switch with more powerful is undeniably a good thing because it enables certain third-party series to arrive on Nintendo hardware for the first time, he feels this is less of an enticing prospect for players who have multiple consoles and have already played those games.
What all these people conveniently either don't understand or leave out is Nintendo didn't start making hardware in 2004 with the DS. I seem to remember consoles like the NES (quite powerful for its time, anyone saying otherwise is pulling revisionist history -- the Famicom launched the same day in Japan as the Sega SG-1000 and blew the SG-1000's capabilities away, SG-1000 was more like an Atari), and their first big hardware transition was NES to SNES.
The DS/Wii era is over, it was a transient era for the mid-2000s and frankly was never long term a sustainable way to upgrade hardware. You can't keep inventing new gimmicks every 5-6 years and there's no gauruntee a new one will be well received by an audience. Going back to iterative NES to SNES style upgrades always made more sense and if copping some Sony-style branding cues (like using the literal name Switch 2) comes with that territory in the new Furukawa-Era ... so be it. |
