Was Nintendo right to opt out of the graphics arms race?

[Soundwave]

The Switch 2 isn't a "we opted out of the graphics race" product at all. It's a premium priced product with impressive visual capability and unlike the Wii, DS, 3DS, or Wii U it can even run the modern current gen 3rd party games (Wii U came out just before the PS4 did and wouldn't have been able to run PS4 games) while still being portable. 

So right off the bat, the Switch 2 isn't a low end product, that's the thing I dislike about these types of conversations there's way too many uninformed takes and broad generalizations. Like the Switch 2 is definitely not the same kind of product as the Wii or DS were.

The Switch was kind of a "in limbo" product, it wasn't as good as the Switch 2 is for today graphically when it launched. But they had to choose an off the shelf part (Tegra X1) presumably for time reasons. The Tegra T239 in the Switch 2 is much more custom with Nintendo's involvement and Nvidia has gotten better at making mobile chips on top of that.

As for the Wii-DS-3DS-Wii U era ... well that kinda speaks for itself. Wii and DS were huge successes but Nintendo could not sustain that audience and the Wii U flopped, while the 3DS suffered a massive drop in install base because a lot of casuals bailed out to iOS/Android gaming. I don't think a lot of that casual crowd even understood fully the concept of video game generations. They didn't "get" that they had to buy a new Wii and figured they already had one, why would they buy another one? It was kind of like marrying someone and then finding out afterwards one person really wants kids and the other doesn't want kids (Nintendo's "love affair" with the casual audience). I think Nintendo was shocked at how easily that audience just dumped them. 

The problem always really was Microsoft XBox. Microsoft's wasted everyone's fucking time, including their own, spent a ton of money to get nowhere in the game market and they overcrowded the traditional home console market to make it not attractive to Nintendo any longer. Nintendo would have had to have kept inventing new gimmicks to stay in the home console business model that the Wii established and it wouldn't have worked long term, it was a single boost that was already starting to fizzle out by 2010 or so.

Now the irony is with XBox basically fading out of the business, there actually is probably a spot for a traditional Nintendo console if they really wanted to do that at some point. It would have to share the Switch 2 library as bespoke libraries are today basically impossible due to how long games take to develop. But Nintendo could do that, they wouldn't even need it to sell some massive number because it has a shared library, if it even sells 20 million units it would be considered a gravy bonus on top of the other Switch 2 models.

Last edited by Soundwave - 6 days ago