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

[Soundwave]

BraLoD said:

@Soundwave

Won't quote any of the posts because they are too big, but I'll point out a big outlier you are trying to push here: Switch 2 can run X PS5 game with ease.

Just stop.

Switch 2 is not running the PS5 game, much less with ease, it's running its own version, it's holding back in many places, which doesn't mean the game looks or runs bad, but it's certainly not "running PS5 games with ease", the PS5 itself isn't running them with ease, it's running as best as it can unless the devs are lazy, which is not that easy to happen as many games are built with the PS5 in mind at its base.

The way you word your posts even sound like you are saying the Switch 2 is stronger than the PS5...

As I said to someone else in another thread, it's a pretty decent hardware considering it's a portable system, even if the specs may not match some portable PCs, it's not what it is supposed to do, that doesn't matter.

Personally I do think the Switch 2 should be $400 instead of $450, it does have many flaws like the screen, battery life and storage capacity, storage capacity alone is something costly nowdays and just 256gb is sad, specially with the game key card massive push. Double the memory alone would make $450 way better.

It is in a way better position than the Switch 1 was tho, it was insane that was $300 and never dropped, but I do agree the screen being worse than it was before makes no sense at all.

Anyway, I don't think anyone should be sad with the Switch 2 right now, it'll obviously fall behind more and more as times goes on and and eventually we have the likes of the PS6, but even so, that's definitely not what you should be expecting from the device, if you are, you should already be investing in a much more expensive portable PC.

False, the Switch is not getting "bespoke" versions of any of these ports. Star Wars Outlaws even has the ray tracing intact because they weren't about to go back and create a custom version. 

And Outlaws is effectively a launch window game, it's not some project that took a year to make and came out in the middle of the product cycle. 

These are the same versions of the games on other platforms just with some PC settings tweaked. 

And that is not a random coincidence, IMO Nintendo asked for this exact set of performance, something that would allow them to have PS5 ports and Nvidia and Nintendo likely did a lot of optimization on the chip to get to this point. This isn't like "whoopsie dooopsie! What a happy surprise that it can run Madden NFL and NBA 2K and Star Wars Outlaws and Assassin's Creed Shadows and FF7 Rebirth etc. etc. etc.". 

Personally I don't think you know enough about supply chain costs to making claims about what a system should cost. In this day and age $450 is reasonable for a portable device of this power, even if this was a Sony product this would be a lot of power for a mobile device for 2025. I see you're also oblivious to internal storage costs skyrocketing of late, Nintendo is lucky they didn't go much higher than what they have or they'd probably be getting into loss territory fairly easily. 

This ain't 20 years ago anymore either when companies could do stupid shit like lose $80+ per Playstation console, you try that today and your stock price will bomb harder than a Carrot Top movie, there's too many retail stock investors today who will dump stock at the first sign of a drop in revenue, even Sony won't do that anymore. You have to make a profit off hardware (see also: PS5 Pro being priced out of most people's budgets) nowadays. 

A lot of gamers are frankly spoiled by a lot of things from 20 years ago that doesn't fly anymore and they're now dumbfounded that the AI boom is causing massive increases in cost. The whole "you get bleeding edge hardware for the low low price of $300-$400 forever!!" was never going to continue indefinitely and $50 max for games forever!!!! It's a spoiled attitude frankly that applies to literally nothing else you buy. That can of Coke? You sure as fuck are going to pay a heavy profit margin to the Coca-Cola company and the cost is way higher than it was even 5 years ago thanks to inflation (Coca-Cola ain't eating that cost). 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 11 January 2026