It seems unlikely they would be willing to let go of control like that. With all their oddball stuff, you were still largely within the Nintendo ecosystem. They also probably don't want to deal with the piracy problem on PC, considering they already deal with it on their relatively locked-down consoles.
For better or for worse, Nintendo also likes to really control the experience you get playing games on their platforms; It would probably not be a great look for them to have to deal with thousands of customers that are trying to run their games on hardware older than a Switch and complaining that it's a terrible experience. Yeah the existing hardware is underpowered, but its uniformly underpowered, and that's worth quite a bit too.
I think for Nintendo, the more prudent solution would be to release an updated Switch with some more powerful hardware that's fully backwards compatible with the existing Switch library. It would be very par for the course for them, and assuage most of the complaints about the Switch being underpowered.
I mean, the SoC on the switch was long in the tooth at launch. It's almost exactly the same hardware as in the tegra shield that came out two years prior, but Nintendo clocks it down to 1Ghz, about half the speed of the shield.
There's some legitimate complaints that it's a dog slow system because of that. For instance this new Zelda is frame locked to 20fps in some areas apparently.
Honestly this is the time to start working on a Switch successor, they could easily more than double the current compute capabilities while keeping the same or lower power envelope.
That doesn't even counts the untapped bonuses from much higher memory speeds.
I would instantly buy this, we would be looking at mobile machines more powerful than a PS4 Pro which is imho more than enough for the type of console.
Nintendo doesn't even need to build it on the latest state of the art TSMC process, even the 5nm should be enough.
This is Nintendo though so I expect nothing.
They've been working on successor for 4+ years now. That's how long new console cycles are now. PS5 dev cycle stated 2 years after PS4 released.
Why? Will it make the games more fun to play? Does it enable more fun games? I don't see it. Nintendo has always thrived on underpowered hardware.
In the past, Nintendo either forgone backwards compatibility completely (Nes->SNes->N64->GC, Wiiu->Switch), or specially built their upgraded consoles to have a low level hardware compatibility mode were it behaves 100% like the old console (Gamecube->Wii, Wii->WiiU, several handlheld upgrades). Today it doesn't make business sense for Nintendo to build a new console without backwards compatibility, and it is impossible technically to build one with low level compatibility. So they are left with the only option of a incompatible console with some partial emulation, which must be a much bigger step that kneecaps the existing switch once announced, so they will take only after the switch starts its decline.
People who bought a Switch many years ago are still willing to buy new games. They may not all be willing to replace it so soon however if Nintendo release pretty much the same but with better resolution and framerate and the release of a new one would probably mean the stop of new release on the current gen.
However, the Game Boy ran forever on 4 AA batteries. Which is part of the reason why the original Game Boy has outsold every other non-Nintendo handheld gaming system except the original PSP, combined.
However it also potentially makes them vulnerable to being on the upgrade treadmill that e.g. phone manufacturers have to be on. Expectations and pressure will be there to be on the "next" SoC platform.
But more so it makes them less "unique" and "bespoke" and it becomes very hard to differentiate the Switch from any mass market phone or tablet. It's basically that, but with Nintendo's own OS instead of Android, and along with that their highly sandboxed environment.
Not really. If you can get better performance emulating a newly released game on the Steam Deck, then the complaints have merit. (See Pokemon Scarlet and Violet for instance.)
What I'd like to see is a much stronger CPU/GPU that gets severely undervolted/underclocked while on mobile (or the big cores in it's big.LITTLE design being way bigger), but a dock that comes with fans that force feeds air in to allow the hardware to run significantly faster when docked. Expandable SSD storage on the dock would be excellent as well.
Besides, the Steam Deck has shown that even very demanding high end games designed without any consideration for mobile hardware can be sufficiently scaled down to run on mobile hardware (and mobile hardware has gotten powerful enough where the tradeoffs are tolerable).
> It's perfectly possible to create innovative and - most important - fun games on something as powerful as the Switch.
Of course, but there have been plenty of games released for the Switch that could seemingly do with a bit more oomph from the hardware, TotK being the current example.
Sure it is. But that's not what AAA titles are, most of them run at locked 30 that sometimes drop to 20 and in action game that will be noticeable.
People are complaining beacuse the "console sellers", the biggest budget titles are struggling and just play better on emulation
Valve has proven that you can get extremely high performance on a mobile device with the Steam Deck.
Personally, I'd be happy enough if the Nintendo Store didn't take half a minute to load assets.
Many would be happy just to get 60fps across the board for their flagship titles like Zelda. That doesn’t require anything like “PS5-level performance”, and is an entirely reasonable ask given the current Switch is on 9 year-old silicon.
PS5-level performance on a six year old mobile device, no less. It's showing its age now, but it's still a fun little device and has a few absolute bangers. BotW and Super Mario Odyssey alone are nearly worth picking one up.
This could result in fragmentation: some games could only run smoothly on the new version.
I pretty like the idea of using old hardware and to require game dev to adapt to this.
