RolStoppable said:
Haven't checked his blog in a while because he turned very bipolar. He's been negative about the Switch successor since a few years, talking about how there will be no physical games anymore and other erratic claims. He also constantly claimed that he is done buying Switch games and now several years later he posts that he owns 500+ physical games. The point is that he has been swinging from one extreme to the other on a regular basis, so a lot of his blog posts are more about ranting than an actual analysis. About Switch 2 he says it's going to be a dark age for Nintendo, the prices are way too high, but at the same time the big Nintendo games are going to be fine. And of course he picks to respond e-mails that reinforce the negativity. But let's step back for a moment to look at the big picture. Virtually all the current outrage concerns prices. People don't criticize the concept of the console, nor its games, nor its specs, nor its foreseeable release schedule, there's hardly anything about the battery life which falls always in the same range as the original Switch's (2 to 6.5 hours now vs. 2.5 to 6 hours back then). Prices are getting hit hard, but at the same time they are the easiest thing to fix. We don't have an ideal situation that will make Switch 2 an unquestionable immediate and lasting success, but we aren't far off. As far as a dark age is concerned, it implies that Nintendo's business will operate at around the break-even point or even at a loss. Yeah... no. This is so much hyperbole that I can't even be bothered to take this serious. It's true that Malstrom's track record for predicting success or failure for Nintendo hardware has been clean ever since he has shown up. But at the same time his track record for competent analyses of smaller things has become very erratic, often devolving to the level of "old man yells at cloud." He hasn't had to predict success or failure for Nintendo hardware since eight years ago. Does he still have it? Maybe, but one thing is for sure: His overall body of work has regressed a lot over the course of the Switch generation. He used to be able to provide perspectives on a myriad of game-related topics that hardly anyone else could offer, but over time his blog devolved more and more into frustrated rants and plain trolling, like his recurring claim that Switch is a handheld and all of Nintendo's games are handheld games that they are charging home console prices for. Which raises the question: If Nintendo has pulled it off to make people pay $60 for games that were previously $40, then why should it now be a problem for Nintendo to make people pay $70-80 for games that were previously $60? That's the bipolarity of today's Malstrom. |
Yeah, he has become somewhat...erratic. But he tends to be spot on with most things Nintendo. We'll see.
