No one cares about premium, premium is a niche, tiny ass market.
Mainstream consoles have to have reasonable concessions, that goes for Sony and MS too.
And in the big picture those concessions are fine, I don't look back at the Super NES and say "oh fuck, I wish it was $700 like the Neo Geo so I could have a few extra sprites on screen so that only I and two other people could afford it". No ... that would be stupid, as a matter of fact part of the appeal of consoles is that regular people buy them en masse in the millions creating cultural touch points. Like I can talk to lots of people about what NES or SNES or Playstation 1 or PS2 or GameCube or whatever they grew up with and we all have great memories about that. That means more than technology. I can't talk to many people about a Neo Geo or 3DO because 99.999999999% of people never had one of those consoles because they priced at a ridiculous price point.
It's not about "well dur hur, I must have XYZ tech features or this game isn't fun" in the long run. It's only about having enough hardware power to run the games of your time well enough to get the experience across. That's *all*. When I think about playing Street Fighter 2 for hours on end with friends on my Super Nintendo I don't think "it didn't have equal graphics to the arcade, my life was ruined and I couldn't enjoy the game". That's just stupid.
You have to live in a really detached bubble to not get that. Of course game consoles have compromises, they have to in order to be mass market. It's like listening to a person drone on and on about a popular hamburger place not being a 5 star michelin restaurant with a high end wine list ... it's like "shut the fuck up buddy, you know full well this is not that kind of place".
And lol at people lecturing me now about "any game can run on any platform", lmao I was saying scalability was a big reason Switch 2 would run tons of PS5 games years ago and get attacked constantly in threads for it and now I need to be lectured about that. LOL, I was saying that before and getting dumb shit thrown in my face like Switch 2 won't be able to run Final Fantasy VII Integrade (yes THAT one, not even Rebirth lol). So you'll excuse me if I kindly laugh at that shit now. This board wasn't able to reasonably discuss this console in a mature way for years because of stupid ass biases they had about "Nintendo doesn't get top end games", every thread about it would devolve into doomerism from the same idiots. Those people have learned their lesson most likely now and probably understand this era Nintendo is not 2006 era Nintendo and there are significant differences, decades have actually moved on (believe it or not).
"Nintendo" is not one singular thing either, they change radically decade to decade, early 90s Nintendo is even different from mid-90s Nintendo, mid-90s Nintendo is different from mid-2000s Nintendo (massively). Current Nintendo is very different from Nintendo of even 10-15 years ago. Like the fact that some people cannot even grasp that concept creates a lot uninformed takes. Don't act like you're an expert on something if you don't know really what you're talking about. If you don't even know who the current president is or hardware designers and you're discussing things as is the company has the same people running it from 20 years ago it's like trying to have conversation with someone who thinks the NBA or NFL or NHL still has to same players from 20 years ago. If you're trying to talk like basketball while still operating under the assumption that Yao Ming still plays for the Houston Rockets, like I hate to break this to you, but you don't have a clue what you're talking about.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 13 January 2026
