I don’t know that Nintendo was forcing the issue for profit. I also don’t know the costs and margins (if any) for Nintendo or who they were working with to get the storage, to be fair. But I have to assume that if Nintendo had signficantly cheaper access to storage and was artificially throttling to everybody else you’d have seen more first party games on larger carts, and that wasn’t necessarily the case.

Regardless, any solid state storage was always going to be more expensive than optical storage and scale up with size gradually in a way that optical storage doesn’t (until you have to go to a second disk or an additional layer, at least). Cartridges are just inherently riskier and more expensive, even at the relatively modest spec of the Switch 1. Definitely with what seems like competitive speeds in Switch 2.

That doesn’t mean one has to like the consequences of it. At the same time I’m not sure I can imagine a realistic alternative for a portable. We’re not doing UMD again, so…

It was, though.

Objectively. This is not an opinion.

Switch 1 carts HAD to be purchased from Nintendo. It wasn’t an off the shelf part. They weren´t SD cards priced commercially, they were a specific order that was part of manufacturing a physical copy and stacked up on top of printing labels and paperwork, making cases, shipping them to stores and so on. Margins for physical media are garbage as it is, but Switch carts were significantly more expensive than, say, a PS5 BluRay and they crucially ramped up quickly with size.

Technically the carts were available to higher sizes, but there’s a reason you very rarely saw any Switch 1 games with cart sizes bigger than 16 gigs. Basically the more stuff you put in your game the more expensive it was to physically make the boxed copies. Crucially, that is a cost you had to pay whether you sold the carts or not. It was a manufacturing cost.

Look, at this point it’s hardly worth it trying to wrap one’s head around industrial retailed boxed copy software manufacturing, but trust me, physical Switch games were relatively and absolutely expensive to make in an environment where digital distribution was king and the next most expensive version was dirt cheap optical media.

Oh, I missed the UHD bit, right. Triple layer it’d cap at 20-25, yeah. Technically Switch carts were available up to 32GB, but I think like one or two games ever used that much, they were so expensive. That’s where the partial download stuff comes in.

Of course for optical media the solution was always to ship multiple discs, because the smaller discs are so cheap. Or were. With most optical media manufacturing phased out who knows how expensive optical will become.

Good question. What was the UMD, 1GB? From the DVD default, which was 4GB single layer and 8 dual layer? Blurays are 25GB single layer,so 25% of that is like 7gigs, which is still smaller than the 16gigs the larger Switch carts were. But hey, a lot of games on Switch were smaller, dual layer discs would get you almost to the same size and be a fraction of the cost.

Well, the discs would be. I have no idea how much the weird plastic caddy on UMDs pushed the price up.

I don’t know about that. Reception to most of this Direct seems to be positive, they have a literal 10x sales advantage and 150 million people already in the ecosystem.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it sold a lot slower, but half as fast as the Switch 1 is still faster than the PS5 and much faster than the Steam Deck.

Will PC handhelds gain some ground? Maybe, I’m curious to see.

Yeah, it definitely puts their overhaul of digital game sharing in perspective. They are ABSOLUTELY shifting to digital. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Switch 2 Lite had no cartridge slot at all.

That said, their idea here seems to be that you have a physical cart with a game license in it so you can download the game on multiple consoles and then just swap the key around. That is not a new idea, but it goes to show how frustrated by the limitations of having to ship flash memory with every game they are.

Yep. This is a shockingly… Playstationy proposition. First party games aside I would have not been surprised to see a Vita revival be this exact console. I mean, they’re basically shipping Bloodborne 2 and EyeToy.

Yeah, sure, that’s always the case for consoles. I have no objection to that train of thought. If you want versatility and an open platform you’re going to be better off with a similarly specced PC handheld. At the cost of first party exclusives and a few other creature comforts, but if you’re only going to buy one device and that’s a priority that’s clearly the way to go.

Looking at it in general and in the market and just looking at the hardware they’re packing in, though, their proposition isn’t super overpriced. The part that is a bummer is they seem to be shifting that extra cost to other places with the subscription, generational upgrade packs, higher physical game prices and so on.

This conversation is kinda surreal and I think I want it to stop.

Even if you were correct about this, and you are not, especially in modern times, this only applies to one part of the APU. The GPU is still your run of the mill CUDA-based Nvidia GPU, effectively a PC part. And this is a handheld, a lot of the cost is stuck in the display, controllers, storage and the rest of the hardware package. The CPU component of the APU is not going to be what sets the baseline for cost unless you’re building in a super high-end part.

I can’t parse how you’re looking at this, but I assure you that it doesn’t counter the point that this thing seems to both perform similarly and cost about as much as the current batch of PC handhelds. I don’t know how this is a back-and-forth thing.

Yep. The slight difference is that those Switch games typically included a chunk of the game in the cart and sometimes were partially playable. Short of requiring a smaller download, though, it was the same practical function.

I still don’t like it, but those carts get prohibitively expensive at high sizes.

It’s actually not “only on the Switch 2”. There were a bunch of Switch one games that only came with a partial set of assets and required a mandatory download to be played.

It sucks, and it’s what you get when your physical storage is too expensive and too small, unfortunately.

Yep, agreed. I mean, revolutionizing the entire concept of home consoles and starting an entire new hardware segment is a hard act to follow, I wasn’t expecting to be blown away by an iteration on the same idea.

Would have been nice, though.

Sure, anything is cheap if you don’t pay for software. Kinda not how we measure the value of the hardware.

I mean, by that metric, and considering how Nintendo’s software security has been, historically, the Switch 2 is probably going to get dirt cheap real soon, by your standards.

Yes, I am implying that the price is right because the performance is similar. ARM isn’t fundamentally cheaper than x64, I don’t know where you get that. The Switch was cheap because it was running a cheap, old, basically off-the-shelf part, not because that part had an ARM CPU. And indeed the Deck is running an older AMD APU as well at this point.

My laptop has an ARM CPU in it. I assure you it wasn’t any cheaper than the equivalent x64 version with the same performance.

Yeah, well, that’s not really a good thing in my book. You also arguably don’t need a thousand games you’re not gonna play. One of the things I’d like to see this gen on the Switch 2 is more curated discoverability and less shovelware.

I think your argument will make more or less sense depending on how the physical market eveolves. The price bump for physical is a bummer, but this generation it’s been very easy to find cheap physical copies, both new and used.

At the end of the day, PC handhelds are like PCs, you tend to pay more for the hardware (only the very cheapest LCD version of the Deck is cheaper than the Switch 2, and multiple specs are actually worse) and on consoles you get more affordable hardware but typically more expensive games, at least day one.

So at worst the Switch 2 is… you know, a console. The pricing of the hardware is by far the least egregious pricing choice in this whole thing. If anything, the Switch 2 feels weirdly standard for Nintendo’s typical strategy. They have a tendency to sell very old hardware at some profit instead of subsidizing it. This feels weirdly comparable to the PC handheld segment.

I said “considering how similar hardware on PC handhelds stacks up”, meaning the current batch of PC handhelds seem to get similar performance and visuals than what they showed today. You claimed that the hardware isn’t similar because the CPU is an ARM device.

If you meant that to mean that the performance is the same despite the different architecture you have to walk me through how you thought I was going to interpret that from you caveating that the architecture is different with no additional context, but I guess I’ll take it?

I understand what you were saying. I’m saying it doesn’t make a fundamental difference what architecture is being used and there are other aspects that impact performance, so you can’t make assumptions based on that. Plus the GPU is very PC-like, or at least it was on the first Switch. Porting to these things is actually surprisingly straightforward.

Don’t quote me, but I think they will ship a plastic guard to use for the mouse, just like the Lenovo Legion Go does. Don’t knock it til you try it, it does work.

For the record, it’s weird to see Nintendo stumble upon the incredible concepts of Kinect and Discord in the year of our lord 2025. But hey, every Nintendo console needs a gimmick you can proceed to ignore, and this one will at least be useful to… somebody? At least it’s a gesture that online games aren’t an afterthought anymore.

What I’m not sure about at all is the pricing model for games and backwards compatibility as it is. And while the hardware is perfectly acceptable for a modern handheld and very comparable to the current batch of PC handhelds it’s the target for the next decade, presumably, so it’s at best as outdated as the original Switch was while not being the only game in town to play some of those HD ports.

I don’t think it’s an underwhelming propostion at this point, and you can’t deny the first party software on display. I don’t think it’s nearly as exciting as the first Switch, though. We’ll see how it does with mainstream audiences, I suppose.

The Steam Deck is… not significantly cheaper?

I mean, go nuts. It will have cheaper games, a lot of the same cross-platform stuff and it trades blows on performance and display, from what I can see… but price isn’t really the biggest difference here.

That is entirely meaningless. That’s not how performance works, it has no bearing on anything.

In practice, they showed a whole bunch of footage of comparable games, including Elden Ring, Cyberpunk. Hitman, Star Wars Outcasts and Split Fiction. At a glance, it seems fairly comparable to the current batch of PC handheld APUs and seems to be mostly running cross-gen PC games at lower resolutions and framerates but pretty solidly otherwise.

That puts it in a weaker spot than next-gen PC handhelds, but on par with most of the current batch. Or at least as on par as the Steam Deck is.

So in terms of pricing for the hardware it seems pretty consistent with what we’re seeing elsewhere. The two Deck models seem to have the most comparable specs, and those are slightly cheaper for the LCD and slightly more expensive for the OLED. Other handhelds are marginally more powerful but also way more expensive. With the upcoing batch of high-end AMD APUs being also way more expensive than last gen, it seems the Switch 2 is price-competitive, at least until Valve decides it’s time and tries to make another custom deal with AMD for a more powerful APU at scale.

Got it, thanks. Yeah, it seems it’s a 10 euro extra for physical. I get why, those Switch carts were expensive, and it seems like they’ve moved to even more expensive, faster storage, but it REALLY sucks. Puts the “virtual card” stuff they announced in perspective.

It just seems crazier for MK specifically because… well, it’s forty bucks with the bundle, and the bundle is digital-only. Makes physical 2x the cost, which is nuts.

They’re really milking this launch on a number of avenues I’m not cool with, and I’m not sure the offering justifies it. Some of those current-gen ports looked rough.

Got a link? My official Nintendo site hadn’t updated with Switch 2 info when I checked. Do they detail the contents of the physical versions?

The reporting I’m seeing puts it at 40 if you buy the console bundle. Which… I mean, why wouldn’t you?

I’m not sure what the deal is with the physical version, I have to assume it’s some collector’s edition deal with an Amiibo or something. Can’t imagine they straight up double the price if you want to buy the card in a box instead of bundled with the console. Waiting on official prices for all of it, in any case.

It’s both not unexpected and actually pretty reasonable, considering how similar hardware on PC handhelds stacks up.

I’m more upset at the nickel-and-diming of resolution and performance upgrades for Switch 1 games, to be honest.

But they fussed about Call of Duty.

If I’m annoyed about anything it’s that. Gamers are so often using these ostensible customer protection or political affinity issues as a cudgel for what is ultimately a branding preference. This results on excusing some crappy stuff from people they semi-irrationally like (loot boxes on Steam games are fine!, we don’t talk about GenAI on InZOI!) but give extreme amounts of crap to companies they semi-irrationally dislike even for relatively positive things they do.

I’d mind less if the difference was based on size or artistic quality, but dude, InZOI is from Krafton. I don’t know that the PUBG guys are the plucky indies I want to stretch my moral stances to support.

Is that where it is now? I haven’t looked at the documentation in an age. I think most stay lower because ultimately cloud storage is a cross-platform concern and different first parties have different requirements. Plus you want to keep it under control anyway. At any rate it’s not a huge concern and other services like PSN or Nintendo Online already charge for it, so… not a dealbreaker as long as the base implementation stays free.

It’s on par with Steam, I think. You get like 200 megs per product. I know because my Witcher 3 install is above that and it’s annoying. That wouldn’t be a dealbreaker as a subscription benefit, I don’t think.

With the rest I do agree.

I can tell they’re struggling and have been for a while. It isn’t easy to compete with Steam, and the thing that would have done it (having DRM’d new games in the service) was voted down in a similar survey some time ago.

I would not be against some Patreon-like crowdsourced solution for behind the scenes stuff and prioritization rights. GOG, or something like it MUST exist. Steam is bad enough with their current dominant position, it can’t be the sole remaining option in this market.

I would much prefer to be able to give them more money in exchange for more games, though. I am constantly frustrated by how often some indie game is only available on Steam, and I’ve started buying things full price on GOG but waiting for sales on Steam as a matter of policy.

Those goalposts are moving at supersonic speeds, man.

“AI driven NPCs” are just chatbots, and generative AI is generative AI. I thought the issue with GenAI was supposed to be that the data for training was of dubious legitimacy (which these models certainly still are) and that they were cutting real artists, writers and developers out of the workforce (which these by definition are).

Nobody seemed to be particularly fine with Stable Diffusion when that came out and could be run locally. I guess we’ve found the level of convenience against which activism will just deal with it.

Which, again, is fine. I don’t have a massive hate boner against GenAI, even if I do think it needs specific regulation for both training and usage. But there is ZERO meaningful difference between InZOI using AI generation for textures, dialogue and props and Call of Duty using it to make gun skins. Those are the same picture.

They’re not even introducing regualtions. These are non-binding guidelines, as far as I can tell. Basically a declaration of how the relevant EU protection services will interpret existing EU regulations. They explicitly don’t force courts or individual member states to do anything. You could follow these rules and get sued in your country… or you could ignore them and win in court.

They do address that:

When in-game digital content or services are offered in exchange for in-game virtual currency that can be bought (directly or indirectly via another in-game virtual currency), their price should also be indicated in real-world money. The price should be indicated based on what the consumer would have to pay in full, directly or indirectly via another in-game virtual currency, the required amount of in- game virtual currency, without applying quantity discounts or other promotional offers Although consumers may acquire in-game virtual currency in different ways and quantities, for example through gameplay or due to promotional offers, this does not change the price of the in-game digital content or services itself. The price must constitute an objective reference for what the real-world monetary cost is, regardless of how the consumer acquires the means to purchase it.

I would argue this is a remarkable loophole, though. It effectively means they are ordering devs to display a higher price in real money than in virtual currency. Effectively a prompt that goes “this is normally ten bucks, but if you buy it this way you can get it for seven in virtual currency” would be following this recommendation to the letter.

Turns out regulating things this granularly is actually kinda hard. Go figure.

Yeeeah, no, they did nothing of the sort.

This seems to be a set of non-binding guidelines for HOW to provide virtual currencies in games as per consumer protection agencies within the EU. Specifically that when something can be bought with purchasable currency it needs to show the money price next to the in-game-currency price and that currency packs should not be deliberately mismatched to in-game item prices to leave frustrating leftovers to encourage more purchases.

This article is just incorrect. Please seek better sources, like the direct link to the text someone more competent than this reporter provided.

Yeah, there were a few attempts in the 00s (including several NSFW ones, for some reason). It’s definitely tough to get right. I see the on-paper appeal of InZOI, in that it seems to be going for the same “we’ll do what Maxis won’t” appeal the original Cities: Skylines had. It’s just that with The Sims you risk finding out there was a good reason for what they weren’t doing, I guess.

I don’t know what’s going on at Maxis. I don’t know that rolling a whole modern platform, games-as-service approach into Sims 4 retroactively is the right call, regardless of it’s due to a lack of capacity to do it or a strategic choice. I am pretty sure that a lot of the stuff in InZOI isn’t doing it for me, though. Those two ideas can be held at once.

I see how some of the weirdness in InZOI is in “so bad it’s hilarious” territory.

I am not an anti-GenAI zealot, myself. I actually think a few of the ways they use it there are perfectly valid and make sense to support user generation… but are almost certainly a moderation nightmare that is about to go extremely off the rails. Others are more powerful than Sims on paper but the UI seems bonkers and borderline unusable.

I can see the idea of wanting another Sims successor, or both a successor and a competitor, but it’s hard to see the treatment as anything but hypocritical at this point. If anything, I think it shows that there is a reason why there is such a gap between The Sims’ success and how many viable competitors have surfaced. Turns out The Sims is REALLY hard to get right. Even Sim City, which feels more complex at a glance, was much easier to clone or improve.

I’m a bit surprised about the coverage of InZOI so far. You’d think that the extensive use of generative AI would be driving a bit more outrage, going by how the Internet has treated the issue when it comes to Activision recently. Or the extreme amounts of jank, while we’re at it. People seem… reluctant to appear to be defending The Sims, I suppose.

I mean, the article is right there:

Despite this, Kjun says he believes in the value of InZOI’s visual direction. “The realistic graphics also have clear advantages,” he explains, “they enhance immersion in both building and character customization, and the detailed world design has even led to some interesting moments during development. There were times when we looked at screenshots and had to double-check whether they were from the game or real-life photos.

Looks good, seems fun and it’s obviously ripping off the SNES demakes of the X-Men CotA and MSH Capcom made, which is 100%, absolutely the right choice.

Can’t wait.

Yep. Same as the Strix Point APUs and the M series Apple stuff and the Steam Deck and the Switch and a whole bunch of other things.

It’s kinda weird that people are beign shocked by this only now. I guess the long tradition of laptop iGPUs sucking has led to some weird assumptions.

See, the thing about this framing is that by this logic the PS5 is also doing this “without a graphics card”. They’re both APUs, they both have a GPU in them.

So I’m torn on this until I can test it.

Right now you can absolutely share digital games. You do need to have your account logged in on both machines and only the one where your “main” account sits can play the games offline.

This seems both easier and harder? There are now arbitrary time limits and per-game activations, which seems like a massive mess. Before the only limit was that a game couldn’t be played in two places at once and that secondary consoles needed to stay online.

But conversely, the “main account” thing was annoying for a portable, so if you shared with someone that carried their console around outside the house it kinda required giving THEM the main account with all the games and keeping the secondary for yourself. This is a very parent-like situation to be in. So… that’s better?

The worry here is that this sure seems like setting the groundwork to give up on physical media altogether without messing with the way people use Nintendo portables, and that is a bad thing overall. Given Nintendo’s dumb, litigious approach towards these things they’re getting no benefit of the doubt from me in this area.

Yep, that tracks. Probably some people mixing up how much funding a studio was raising with the budget of the game’s production.