So...nintendrones, ya know, hardcore nintendo fanboys, keep accusing me of having a double standard for nintendo that I dont have for other console manufacturers. And...I wanted to actually set the record straight and explain why I've focused so much on nintendo here.
1) They released a new console and discussing it is an autistic interest of mine
I mean, the switch 2 is gaming news. PS5 and Xbox Series X have been around for 5 years now. If anything we're probably closer to their successors than their launches given modern consoles are on a 7-8 year life cycle. And I admit i'm a little obsessed with it, but that's just me with my autism baby. I cant control what im obsessed with, I'm just obsessed with it.
2) I'm a PC gamer...
Who says that I give micro$oft and $ony a pass for their behavior? The dollar signs as Ss in their name should sum up my disdain for those companies too. Either way, I hate the console market in general. I think all consoles are scams compared to PC gaming. You got these closed systems or "walled gardens" where you gotta deal with their eco system when in reality, their consoles are just....PCs with custom operating systems. Let's face it, consoles are computers. Except everything is configured for them already. It makes for an easier user experience, and given consoles are often sold at a loss they're cheaper than PCs up front, BUT....they also get a lot of extra money from more expensive games, paying for online services (the thing that made me gtfo of the console market), accessories, etc.
3) Nintendo hasn't competed with the other consoles in almost 20 years now...
Let's face it, back in the day, console wars were actually interesting. And nintendo competed directly with the likes of the sega genesis, the playstation 1, the dreamcast, the ps2, the xbox, etc. But....sony beat them. Twice. Overwhelmingly. I dont even know why. Quite frankly i think sony's game library, while the biggest on paper, is the most boring and least appealing to me.
I've stated before that my opinion on gaming during 6th gen was blah, but it was blah because i bought the wrong console, the PS2. Why did I buy the PS2? Peer pressure. Everyone in my school at the time went PS2 and it was the "cool kids console". But it didnt have a great library IMO, and xbox and game cube in retrospect appeal to me more. I guess people really wanted the DVD player and thought GTA was the edgy cool thing in middle school at the time, idk. Quite frankly, going back I wish I got gamecube. Their library was way better. And it was cheaper. But it sold like crap. Because of the dvd player thing? Idk.
Either way, nintendo stopped competing and went in a huge change in direction after that. And that's when...I stopped caring about anything nintendo did. Ever. Their DS was the last console i bought at the time. It was underwhelming. Hyped up as a handheld N64 but then it was mostly shovelware and 2D games. The Wii did motion controls. Everything with nintendo became gimmicks and they stopped competing with other consoles.
Since then, they've run weak consoles a generation behind their competition, they relied on gimmicks like motion controls, but one thing I had to give them credit for? They were cheap and kinda set a low bar. Very accessible for children, casual gamers, etc. And they still had good games at the time. But yeah. PS3 and Xbox 360 just shifted toward the becoming more generic and like gaming PCs. And I just...bought a gaming PC after that.
And quite frankly, i had no reason to ever touch $ony or micro$oft's crap. But nintendo? THey still offered something different on paper, and given they never released their stuff on PC, i was always tempted to get their consoles. And sometimes i got stuff second hand from friends getting rid of old consoles and stuff. Playstation and xbox were just competing directly with PC, I was a PC gamer, and the nintendo was off doing its own thing.
4) Nintendo price increases impact the industry as a whole
The 2020s are an era of greedflation. Prices are going up in general, and for the most part, it's not even for any legit reason. It's corporate greed. Yeah, we had some supply chain issues after COVID, but those are quickly resolved and corporations just decide to raise prices for no reason, just because they can. And they get higher profit margins as a result.
When I see nintendo upping their prices, i see a domino effect in the rest of the industry. If nintendo charges $450, i can see sony making $700-800 their new bar for consoles. I mean, and let's not forget PC. We got our own problem with nvidia raising the prices of GPUs by insane amounts. Other PC parts are relatively affordable, but GPU prices have been INSANE. And these other console manufacturers, not nintendo, often push limits, making these consoles relatively affordable and selling them at a loss to bring in consumers and then making it up later through the predatory walled garden crap. PC is more expensive up front with hardware, but cheaper long term due to not putting up with the downsides of being locked into a console's ecosystem.
But thats the thing. If nintendo charges $450 for last gen PS4/Xbox one era hardware, what are microsoft and sony gonna charge? Again, microsoft is already angling for $700. Oh, and they bumped game prices too to $80 right after nintendo did, what a coincidence!
The fact is, the first one to do this stuff was gonna get flak for it. Because then the others will say "we can do it too", and honestly, it is gonna impact me in the PC gaming market as well through higher game prices and and hardware costs. Since consoles are PCs, I need a PC on par with a console to play games at a similar level. It's still hard to match a PS5/Xbox series X for the money, even 5 years later, which is INSANE. Again, it's mainly GPUs. The consoles use an RX 6700 and a RX 7700 XT in their respective iterations of consoles (normal and pro versions). My 6650 XT comes close to the base model, but most cheaper GPUs only have 8 GB VRAM. The 7700 XT has 12, but that's matched by...the 5060...which has 8 GB. And the 9060 XT, which has 16 but only at $350. Again, we're being squeezed too in the PC market by ngreedia and AMD.
Nintendo's pricing strategy is shaking up the market, and not in a good way here. If they sell $450 for some last gen console, it raises the bar and the expectations for sony and microsoft (tired of using the $ but i made my point), and they're gonna make even more expensive consoles too while passing on costs to the consumer. Everything is getting more expensive and as I've discussed previously, it's pricing more price sensitive people out of the market or at least making them buy less than they used to.
5) I just can't get over how predatory nintendo has become
The switch 2's business model feels dystopian. $450 for a console, $80 for games, $10 just for the introduction, aggressive anti piracy measures bricking peoples' consoles just for playing used games that someone else copied, the whole key card thing, paying for online, paying for chat, it's weird. Like, they got you paying for everything and then bricking the entire consoles of people who didnt do anything wrong in the name of anti piracy. It's dystopian. Maybe its the fact that online is built into this stuff, something that was never a thing in previous eras, but i remember the old days. I remember the days before DLC, and season passes, and live service, and online accounts that you gotta pay for. And I just look at what nintendo people put up with and I'm like youre insane. I used to buy most of my games used back in the day. Now I got steam sales and im aware online has changed things, but at least on PC, its very good for the consumer as gaming is relatively cheap on PC. Whatever extra costs you pay for hardware you tend to make up on not paying for online or game sales or cheaper peripherals.
Heck, what inspired this post was me criticizing nintendo selling like $95 for a controller. The nintendrones brigading the anti nintendo sub I'm on by pointing out how some controllers for playstation and xbox are $150. but again, i dont care. Wanna know what controller I use on PC? The logitech F310, aka, the titanic submarine disaster special. I spent $13 on it. If I wanted an xbox type controller of higher quality, I could spend up to $60 for one. I didnt do that because even that's insane.
I game on like $25 keyboards and $45 mice. The mouse I spend a lot on because you need a good and reliable mouse for precision. Cheap mice have poor precision and break often. BUt yeah, I wouldnt pay $95 for a controller. Much less one that is known to get stick drift. You realize I pay $13 for my controllers because yeah, they might be cheap and break, but if they do, I can just buy a new one for $13? For $95, the thing better be nigh indestructible. But it's not. And that's the real cost you get by going console.
6) Nintendo's whole business model just seems antiquated to me
In a sense, Nintendo is the last true console manufacturer. They're the last one that does something different. If I wanna get a playstation or xbox game these days, I get it on PC. I play on my roughly console equivalent PC, and I get the same experience as a console gamer. I get crossplay in multiplayer with console gamers. I get similar graphics, similar frame rates, it's the same experience. And on PC, I get xbox exclusives AND PS exclusives recently. Honestly, theres talk microsoft might be pulling a sega and getting out of the console business and focusing on game pass. Their new "rog ally x" handheld seems to imply this too. I mean, the rog ally is a handheld PC. Their new handheld xbox is...a handheld PC? Like it's just a PC called an xbox. That's the direction microsoft is going.
In all fairness, xbox started as a consolized PC. Like the whole thing was to bring PC gaming to consoles. In a sense, because PC gaming is better, xbox is just turning into PC. Sony, I could see going the same way over time. Because again, these consoles...are just....PCs.
Nintendo, they're the ones who wont play ball. They refuse to put their games on PC. No, you need to buy a special box just to play their games. And then they charge more for games, and never discount stuff much any more, and yeah, they just do their own thing. And...uh...it's not 2005 any more. As a PC gamer, nintendo's biggest turnoff for me is this walled garden stuff. Exclusivity is a thing of the past for the rest of the industry. Doing something different is a thing of the past. We dont do things like this any more.
And honestly? Just to enjoy nintendo products, you need their console, their eco system, etc., and it just feels....no to me.
Like, since getting out of consoles 15 years ago, I've been PC/android with my setup. My main device is a PC capable of gaming, and my secondary device is a tablet. Now I got a razer edge which came with a kishi controller so I can use that as a handheld. And I like things far better that way. Heck, I'd even like a steam deck or a rog ally if it were cheaper and I could get over the downsides of the darned things. Which brings me to my last point.
7) The switch 2 is trying to compete directly with handheld gaming PCs
For as much as nintendo tends to do their own thing, they still somewhat wrapped back around to this console/handheld hybrid model, with the switch 2 being more an underpowered console and an ovespecced handheld. It's too weak to compete directly with the PS5 and the Xbox series X, but it's too strong to compete with say, the android handheld space. THe first switch WAS an android handheld. It was an nvidia shield tablet with extra RAM. THis new switch 2...it's more competing with the steam deck and rog ally. And I see those products as niche. They're very expensive for a handheld, very underpowered compared to actual gaming PCs or laptops, the battery life is awful. Keep in mind nintendo's big thing is normally being cheap and not as good, but very accessible. The game gear was superior to the game boy in specs, but the high cost, large size, and how power usage made it unappealing compared to the smaller, cheaper, and more efficient game boy.
The switch is the successor of both the game boy and previous nintendo consoles. Its underspeccedness becomes an advantage in a way. Because it allows them to make their console ALSO a handheld, thus merging the two markets into one unified platform. With switch 1 they had a decent balance. They took the strongest gaming tablet the market had to offer at the time at a reasonable price point, and turned it into a console. THis time around, they went more in the direction of PC handhelds, with the steam deck being directly compared to the switch 2. And to me, it's just the worst of all worlds. It seems very....not nintendo for me. It's one of the reasons the thing costs so much, and the flaws are obvious. The thing is huge. It has poor battery life. Sure it can run cyberpunk, but it does so at 30-40 FPS on like minimum settings. It's just in that awkward "game gear" zone of handhelds that I generally would try to avoid.
Conclusion
While I have a lot of gripes against nintendo, keep in mind my perspective isn't just mindlessly anti nintendo. I've gotten out of consoles and console fanboyism like 15 years ago, and I'm a PC gamer. Quite frankly, I dont like gaming consoles. I'd rather game on an open platform like PC or android or whatever tf the steam deck does, than be locked into some walled garden where I gotta pay for their services (where PC equivalents are free), buy their stuff on their terms, pay insane amounts for peripherals, etc.
I dont even dislike nintendo in some ways. I think they have strong IPs and lots of decent games. If anything Id like to play their games on non nintendo platforms. Imagine buying mario kart world on steam. That would be amazing (although not for $80). But thats the thing. Their costs, their business model, I dont like the way the company operates. And dont think I just give sony and microsoft a pass. The difference is I largely just laugh in their face when they try to do predatory stuff and then buy their games on PC instead, ON SALE, when I wanna play them.
The thing is, if I wanna play sony and microsoft games, I can. Without paying for online services (since its free on PC). Or spending $95 or $150 for controllers. And also, steam sales. WHile I have to admit sales are lackluster as these guys are taking longer to put games on sale and charging more for them, that's becoming an industry wide problem.
But what singles out nintendo for me is the fact that they do the walled garden stuff, they've historically been the cheaper option but their greed is opening pandora's box in the industry as a whole, and quite frankly, because the switch 2 is new. I aint actually giving the other guys a pass. I praise good deals when I see them and I bash bad deals. And sadly, in the 2020s, gaming as a whole has been going in a direction of more bad deals than good ones. If anything, me dogpiling on nintendo is them dogpiling on the industry in bringing it down even further than it's already gone.
Keep in mind, I'm not a fan of the modern industry at all. I'm the "peak gaming" guy and how we're getting to a point where costs are going up, quality is doing down, and I'm quite frankly in favor of the gaming market just crashing 1983 style at this point, so that it can correct itself, and we get a new normal that hopefully sucks less than this one. The current business model is going in an unsustainable direction, and without course correction, the problems in the industry are just gonna get worse, and not better.
If anything, nintendo's switch 2 is another nail in the coffin as far as im concerned, and then succeeding bodes poorly for the market as a whole, from a consumer point of view at least.