Nintendo's rumored "NX" console has been officially announced as the Nintendo Switch, a console-handheld hybrid. The Switch may be Nintendo's last stand in the console wars:
Previously code-named NX, now named the Nintendo Switch, the device looks like a tablet computer with controllers that attach to its sides. The device was revealed in a short "teaser" video posted on YouTube.
One analyst said the device could be Nintendo's "last shot" at selling a home console. "The Wii U was a car crash, basically," said Paul Jackson of the Ovum consultancy. They fudged the communication and confused everybody with the controller and what the screen was for. As a result it sold about a tenth of what the original Wii sold."
The Wii U was rapidly outsold by Sony's PS4 and Microsoft's Xbox One, although Nintendo has enjoyed success with its handheld 3DS device. The new Switch console can be seated in a dock to play games on a television, or used as a stand-alone portable device. Games will be delivered on small cartridges - a nod to older Nintendo consoles.
The console will use a customized NVIDIA Tegra system-on-a-chip. The core count/type is unknown, as is the choice of Maxwell or Pascal GPU.
The PS4 and Xbox One mid-cycle refreshes could allow Nintendo some breathing room to compete on graphics/processing capabilities, since developers will be forced to support the older consoles:
Strangely, though, the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 may provide some relief. They aren't being abandoned – which means developers will already be focused on building games that scale down to less powerful hardware. It's not unreasonable to imagine the Switch will offer visual quality on par, or very nearly on par, with the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 throughout its lifespan.
Also at WSJ.
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Coverage of the Nintendo Switch console "launch" is available at Ars Technica, Tom's Hardware, Anandtech.
Nintendo Switch uses a USB Type-C cable for charging, and has a battery life ranging from 2.5 to 6.5 hours, comparable to (but less than) the latest version of the Nintendo 3DS XL. It can be played in Console, Handheld, and Tabletop modes. The handheld has a 6.2" 720p screen but the docked console supports 1080p60 gaming.
The Switch has 32 GB of internal storage, some of which is used for the operating system. It has a "game card slot" for games released on some form of proprietary physical flash media, but also comes with a standard microSD slot for expandable storage.
Nintendo will offer a free trial of a paid online gameplay service for the Switch (similar to Xbox Live Gold or PlayStation Plus) until sometime in Autumn.
The system will be released on March 3, 2017 for $299.
Here are some of the games.
Previously: "Nintendo Switch" Coming in March 2017
Will Third-Party Developers Support Nintendo's Switch?
Nintendo says that some Nintendo Switch consoles were stolen in an isolated incident that led to the termination of a distributor's employees and possibly criminal charges:
On Wednesday, a video surfaced of a Nintendo Switch in use, which gave us a good look at the device's software and how its menus work. Nintendo claims that the device in question had been stolen from a distributor.
The maker of the video had claimed that the Switch was a preorder that had shipped early, but walked those statements back. In a statement made to IGN, Nintendo said that the device and others had been stolen by the employee of a US distributor, and the one in the video had been resold.
Earlier this week, individuals claimed to prematurely purchase a small number of Nintendo Switch systems from an unspecified retailer. Nintendo has determined these units were stolen in an isolated incident by employees of a U.S. distributor, with one system being illegally resold. The individuals involved have been identified, terminated from their place of employment and are under investigation by local law enforcement authorities on criminal charges.
Previously: "Nintendo Switch" Coming in March 2017
Will Third-Party Developers Support Nintendo's Switch?
Nintendo Switch Available on March 3rd for $299
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Celestial on Friday October 21 2016, @09:32PM
I'm a video gamer, and I don't get the point of the Nintendo Switch. Granted, I don't get the point of mobile gaming period, but still. Nintendo had a home run with the super-casual video gamers with the Nintendo Wii, but those super-casual video gamers have moved onto gaming on their mobile phones and tablets. Hardcore video gamers have the PC, or PlayStation 4, or Xbox One. This seems an attempt to try to aim at both, and will most likely not get either. Super-casual gamers won't see the point in spending the money for what is essentially an additional tablet that only plays games, and the Switch is seriously underpowered compared to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, nonetheless the PC.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday October 21 2016, @09:39PM
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Celestial on Friday October 21 2016, @09:46PM
I read that, thanks. It's in league with the original Xbox One, which means that the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 4 Pro, and whatever Project Scorpio ends up being officially called are all more powerful. People complained about the lack of power in the Xbox One back in 2013, unable to play games at 1080p. I don't see that getting any better in 2017.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 21 2016, @10:14PM
The two biggest issues with the WiiU (outside the dumb proprietary controller... if they had been a 200 dollar android tablet instead...) were the lack of memory and the lack of OpenCL. The GPU itself wasn't that far behind the competition (R700 chips were good for .6-1.2TFLOPS) performance-wise, although it did lack some tech to make the mostt of the throughput it had. However the biggest issue was designing it with a half-step amount of memory, thinking 4x the previous gen was enough to compete with the next gen (that was probably a combined issue of the GPU architecture and cpu architectures chosen, but it was a huge lapse which MS/Sony were able to exploit thanks to their choice of newer AMD tech capable of addressing far more memory over a much wider data bus.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday October 21 2016, @10:18PM
Well, you've seen the AC comment. My take on it is that it has a chance, since the processing/graphics power is likely to be in the ballpark of Xbox One, and Nintendo has been behind the other two in power for generations now (it's nothing new). Scorpio/PS4K are mid-cycle refreshes, and it seems that new titles will be forced to be backwards compatible with the regular Xbox One and PS4 and meet the same 900p/1080p ~30 FPS targets. So Nintendo does not have to match Scorpio/PS4K. Nintendo Switch won't be doing 4K resolution gaming or 1080p 90 FPS VR, but it remains to be seen whether those things matter (and it might be able to do some VR if you lower the level of detail enough).
The console will probably be able to decode 4K H.265 video, so it can act as a media center for years to come.
The bigger problem might be the jump from PowerPC + AMD GPU to ARM + NVIDIA GPU, while both Microsoft and Sony stick with x86 + AMD GPU and move the consoles closer to being PCs. Or it could be a good thing, smartphone chips vs. PC chips.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 21 2016, @09:45PM
seriously underpowered
Do you believe that having games with better graphics makes them more fun to play?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Friday October 21 2016, @10:53PM
It's someone who doesn't realize the size of the market bounded by "more than casual touchscreen" and "less than 3 hours to enjoy and play correctly".
The main competitor of the Switch is older consoles and their emulators, which it beats by being portable, HD, and party-friendly.
I want split-screen fun games to play with others in my living room. The PC in the bedroom will keep beating consoles at the complex games, so Nintendo trying to fight the others on their turf would just make them bleed cash faster.
(Score: 2) by forkazoo on Friday October 21 2016, @10:57PM
In same cases, that can actually be true. If devs have to dedicate more time to optimizing to get something to run well, it means less time focused on gameplay. If you have faster hardware, your initial shit prototype probably runs "basically fast enough" and you can write much sloppier code. Look at how many games today are glorified 16-bit style games that look just a little bit nicer that what a good SNES game looked like, but require a current GPU and a multi GHz CPU to run...
That's basically why so many games ignored Wii-U this cycle. It's more than fast enough to run games. It's just a pain in the ass to port something targeting a PS-4 to something appreciably slower. That said, next year's low power Tegra will be pretty damn fast compared to last year's chips in the same power envelope. And a ton of devs will be targeting cell phones with much less power than the new Nintendo console.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Saturday October 22 2016, @08:35PM
But I just don't see devs wanting to mess with trying to port their triple a titles to what is basically a glorified cellphone/tablet chip which is what Nvidia has been pushing Tegra as. They can choose X86 and that will give them the PS4 AND the Xbone AND the PC with only minor tweaks as its all bog standard X86 but to support the Switch they are gonna have to basically do a rewrite and also focus on power consumption since the others are running on the mains and this can just as easily be running on battery.
So I have a feeling its gonna be a "chicken and the egg" just like the Wii U, the devs won't support it until they see its a bonafide hit as they don't want to sink millions into making a separate port for a 'console' that may be another bomb and as we saw with Wii U there just isn't enough hardcore Nintendo fanbois to sell a console with no third party support. Whether Nintendo likes it or not people want their Tomb Raiders and Battlefield Is and Maddens and if they can't get them from Nintendo? They go somewhere else. And before someone brings up the 3DS it was not only cheaper than the home consoles but was pushed as strictly a portable, by bringing this into the living room people are gonna compare it to the other 2 and I think they will find it wanting.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday October 21 2016, @11:44PM
People, even kids, nowadays are too desensitized for Nintendo's cartoony teddy-beary kiddie crap where the enemies fart stars and jump off the screen when they die.
What Nintendo needs are dismembered limbs, advanced physics engines for Peach's fat titties, unlocking all-nude mode for Samus Aran, SAW-like boss and player deaths, Satanic technometal stage music, Mario and Wario fighting to the death over lava or spike pits, spoken obscenities ("Che Palle! I'ma gonna rippa your ballsa-offa, Stronzo Luigi!"); and most importantly...
blood, blood, blood.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Saturday October 22 2016, @09:00AM
well i'll tell you something Nintendo definitely has in its favor - the game i'm currently playing, which is exclusive to Nintendo, the plot revolves around murdering the judeo-christian god, in all his sadistic, narcissistic, dictatorial, omnicidal maniacal glory. granted, not all nintendo games involve making pacts with demons and committing deicide and shit, but there are quite a few of them now.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Friday October 21 2016, @10:07PM
I would personally guess that the point is that the 3ds sold very well, but the wiiu did not, and in order to attract 3rd party developers to their console platform they are mixing their console and mobile platforms together.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 22 2016, @04:34AM
I'm an adult. I have an adult job, adult responsibilities, an adult schedule.
I get to spend maybe an hour on a playstation, two hours on a computer ... oh, let's say ... two or three times a month? Maybe?
This isn't because I'm not t3h h4rdk0r3z (although FPS is not my bag, neither are racist slurs delivered electronically from mouthbreathers) but because I'm out and about, doing things.
At the bank? While waiting for an appointment with that nice loan officer dude, I can whip out a Vita, or a 3DS, or whatever, and tap away at my latest hobby. In the doctor's waiting room? Same deal. Lunch break? Same deal. In bed, winding down for the night? Same deal.
I get in lots of gaming time, in aggregate. It just doesn't happen to be on a couch in my house, much. That's your reason.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 21 2016, @11:06PM
I thought for sure there would be another console market crash by now like the atari one in the 80s but they seem to keep chugging along.
Im surprised that you still have 2 or 3 major dedicated consoles with as big a following as now.
You have mobile phones for several years now that have the capability of consoles a generation or two ago.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Friday October 21 2016, @11:57PM
Touchscreen is not a great control medium unless you're actively moving the objects on screen.
I want to stare at the screen while my fingers jump between the buttons, and feel the amount of force I exercise on the analog stick, which I can't do on a phone.
Puzzle games on a phone? Sure, better than via controller. Shooting or RTS game? Gimme a mouse any day. Platformer or fight game? A controller with real buttons or bust.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday October 22 2016, @12:39AM
It's trivial to make a $20 dock that adds plastic buttons on the two sides of a modern smartphone, making it a lot like what the Nintendo Switch mobile setup looks like.
Nintendo could partner with the major Android manufacturers and Apple to make cheap phone add-ons for an existing base of over a billion people, then run their IP (Mario, Zelda, etc.) on the phone. Maybe they could even allow cartridges or SD cards to be inserted into the add-on.
Obviously you run into a problem of different phones having different capabilities, but most of those should be more powerful than the 3DS (without the 3D gimmick).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Saturday October 22 2016, @12:58AM
True, but it's a lot simpler to make nice stable quality games on hardware you control.
And handling multiple controllers while casting to the TV is not a trivial setup for most.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 22 2016, @06:08AM
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday October 22 2016, @09:24AM
You're thinking of VR mode.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23 2016, @01:57PM
It appears that this will not be able to play Wii nor DS games. I think this will be a deal breaker for many, such as myself. They could sell me this as the next progression if I could bring my previously purchased games with me to get me going, but here they are asking me to make an investment from scratch. Will it be compatible with downloaded Nintendo eShop games I wonder?