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. 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?
Holy crap, they also got two million people on the streets. How far are people willing to go to feign outrage without actually having to get off their butts and do absolutely anything?
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.