This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Nintendo has had a trend for the past couple decades of releasing "sequel" consoles that are essentially a modernized version of the old one with extra features, compatible with everything that released on the predecessor.
With all three major console manufacturers prioritizing backwards compatibility, and the rise in PC gaming (universally backwards compatible), people are starting to catch on to the fact that old games don't "expire" after 10 years. I wouldn't be surprised if backwards compatibility just becomes the standard for all gaming consoles going forward.
Tangential, but I'm also interested in seeing how games that released on old consoles and are continued to be played, like Fortnite, will support aging hardware. I don't like that Epic can one day announce the game just no longer works on that console, rendering your purchases null and void until you upgrade your hardware, but I can't expect them to update that version of the game forever.
Games don't have the generational differences they used to. They're mature now. Tech is rarely the blocker anymore. The Switch was "underpowered" at release and is even more underpowered now but the space of "games that would run well on the Switch" is still fairly unexplored, not because anybody is bad but because the space is so big now.
That hardware can no longer compete with platforms that don't throw away their entire library on every release is probably one of the first impacts of games finally maturing. My "next console" was a Steam Deck for partially this very reason, the fact that it came preloaded with years of previous acquisitions.
We're also just seeing the leading edge of the game industry having to deal with the fact that it now has to compete against itself. There's been a number of articles about how $NEW_GAME never even reached a peak player count of something like Skyrim. I think that's currently being written as a sort of a "ha ha, that's sorta funny", but it represents a real problem. It is not unsolvable; Hollywood has always faced this issue and it has historically managed to make money anyhow. But I think AAA gaming is only just beginning to reckon with the fact that they aren't going to get a "free reset" on every console generation. $NEW_GAME really is is competition with Skyrim now, along with a lot of other things. It's not a joke, it's an emerging reality the industry is going to have to grapple with.
>not because anybody is bad but because the space is so big now.
I completely agree but I would actually extend this principle even more aggressively. Even if, for whatever reason, we were hard capped technologically at Windows 98, even that space could be fruitfully explored practically without end, creating new genres, new stories, new games.
Fiction writing carries on just fine in books, and music has certainly benefited from new tech and new methods but there would always be music even if that weren't the case, and same with cinema. I would put tabletop games in this category too. Its continued future viability, independent of future tech advancements may be an important factor in settling whether its art.
Full credit to Nintendo for recognizing they had plenty of unused creative space to play in, and choosing to play by different rules.
It's an emerging reality, but it will be sustained by the market of kids and adult-kids who need "new thing" to play, and have a group of friends in the same boat.
I've said before that I've got a list of games going back 20-odd years that I'd like to play through in retirement, so I'm not the target market, but for online multiplayer games there needs to be a player base that makes it worthwhile, and the swarms are fickle and fast-moving. Helldivers 2 being a recent example to where a large community swarmed.
Having said that, and as someone else pointed out, enduring games like Fortnite will have to cut off certain aging hardware at some point if it's to remain a viable magnet to the swarms.
Aside: I used to go to LANs back in the Quake2 days, and was annoyed with Counterstrike because it essentially halved the player pool of Q2 FFA fragfests. The fragmentation of the market has only continued since then, but the market has also greatly increased in size. I did very much enjoy the unchained chaos of large scale Q2/Q3 FFA and Rocket Arena. Good times.
> Hollywood has always faced this issue and it has historically managed to make money anyhow.
It's harder for video games, because movies take only a couple hours to finish, and you generally want something you haven't seen before each movie night. Video games can take hundreds of hours to play to completion, and some games you can enjoy replaying tens of thousands of times. So the competition from the existing games library is very tough.
Either that, or you've gotten older. The young always want to play that one specific NEW game. Currently that usually means PS5, either Fortnite or Call Of Duty (and yes that one specific version). PS5 only has PS4 backward compatibility, and it isn't going to be emulated any time soon.
> the space of "games that would run well on the Switch" is still fairly unexplored
That's not true at all, many games don't bother with the Switch at all because of dev costs, and Fortnite, one of the most popular games in the world, is struggling on the Switch. I know because I play FN on Switch occasionally, and you can quite literally see all the pain that went into making all that complexity work at approx 25fps.
Even Nintendo can't make the latest Zeldas run at >30fps, and they're relatively low fidelity.
I stopped playing games in 2020 and when I started again late 2024 it was as if nothing has changed since say 2017. The most popular games are still very popular today. I think the reason for this is that I don't play games alone anymore. I always spend time playing with a friend I already know. All those single player games that come and go don't interest me.
I've been organizing LAN parties with my friends for 26 years now and around 2010 to 2016 was the time when games became so good that stopped making sense to upgrade in-between LAN parties.
- Left 4 Dead 2
- Killing Floor 2
- CS:GO
- Grid 2
- GTA V
- StarCraft II
plus nowadays there's stiff free competition, e.g.
- Rocket League
- Brawlhalla
- Dota 2
- LoL
but also from OpenRA, which modernizes Red Alert.
Plus, it's challenging to tell based on screenshots if you're looking at Assassin's Creed III (from 2012) or Assassin's Creed Mirage (from 2023) and there's been 7 !!! other Assassin's Creed games in between.
And looking at the Switch, I'd say the situation for new games is brutal. There's lots of evergreen games with great replay-ability and thanks to the cartridges you can easily borrow them among a group of friends. It's been a while since I last bought a new one because there just wasn't anything different enough from what I already have and like.
My biggest wish for the Switch has been that it'll one day drive my screen at 144Hz to make movement smooth. And it looks like Nintendo is going to deliver exactly that: More powerful hardware for the same old games.
I wonder if Nintendo will also eventually be forced to implement a subscription model and/or if they will start to aggressively push older games without updates out of their store (like what Apple does) because otherwise I just don't see many openings for developers to build a new Switch game and make the financials work. Currently, you're competing with a back catalogue of 4,747 games, so good luck finding anything where you can stand out by being better.
> That hardware can no longer compete with platforms that don't throw away their entire library on every release is probably one of the first impacts of games finally maturing. My "next console" was a Steam Deck for partially this very reason, the fact that it came preloaded with years of previous acquisitions.
This was something that confused me about the concept of consoles in the 90s. The nonexistent value proposition of a console hasn't changed since then.
I assume they serve two purposes:
(1) They're marketed as toys you might buy for someone as a gift.
(2) You might own a console if you don't want to own a computer.
Purpose (2) seems to have withered and died.
> There's been a number of articles about how $NEW_GAME never even reached a peak player count of something like Skyrim. I think that's currently being written as a sort of a "ha ha, that's sorta funny", but it represents a real problem. It is not unsolvable; Hollywood has always faced this issue and it has historically managed to make money anyhow.
One major aspect of copyright law is making it difficult for people to consume media from the past.
It's true that the progress in games is much slower now, but I believe in the console world the main factor is hardware.
Consoles used to have very bespoke architectures, but now are switching to customized versions of relatively off-the-shelf components. Both the PS5 and the last XBox use x86 AMD CPU+GPU combos, probably a variation of their regular G product line.
> I don't like that Epic can one day announce the game just no longer works on that console, rendering your purchases null and void until you upgrade your hardware, but I can't expect them to update that version of the game forever.
Traditionally for these "Live Service"-type games, they announce cutting support for a console, but let you carry your purchases in that specific game (subscription, add-on items, etc), forward to the same game on the next gen of that console.
It's definitely the case for Fortnite, but it still doesn't sit well with me that a service bought on specific hardware can just be taken away with no recourse. I'm not sure what if anything can or should be done about it, but it's weird knowing that many of the most popular PS4 games will be straight up unplayable in a few years
Backwards compatibility is very "cheap" these days though? With no arcane architectures and chip designs. PS5 and Xbox are basically just generic PCs running a restricted OS and Switch is just a phone/tablet.
If the GPU access is through a relatively "thick" API like DX/Vulkan and shaders stored in an intermediate representation like DXIL or SPIR-V, sure, swapping out the hardware implementation is relatively easy.
But if they're shipping GPU ISA binaries as the shaders, you'll have a much harder time ensuring compatibility.
Same with things like synchronization, on both the CPU and GPU (and any other offload devices like DSPs or future NPUs). If they use API-provided mechanisms, and those are used /correctly/, then the implementation can likely be changed. But if they cycle-count and rely on specific device timing, again all bets are off.
Things like DX12 and Vulkan have a large number of sync points and state transition metadata to allow different implementations to be "correct" in things like cache or format conversions (like compression). Not all those transitions are required for every vendor's hardware, and we regularly see issues caused by apps not "correctly" using them when the spec says it's required, as the vendor's hardware they happened to test on didn't require that one specific transition that another implementation might, or they happened across some timing that didn't happen to hit issues.
I guess my point is Compatibility is hard even if the APIs are intentionally designed to allow it. I have no idea how much the idea of such compatibility has been baked into console APIs in the first place. One of the primary advantages of consoles is to allow simplifications allowed by targeting limited hardware, so I can only assume they're less compatibility focused than the PC APIs we already have Big Problems with.
It is cheap only if you don't change CPU or GPU architectures. This is why the PS4 doesn't have PS3 compatibility.
When apple switched to ARM even with x64->ARMv8 translation layer (NOT emulating) it was still noticeably slow in a lot of software. Even though some x64 games worked on ARM macs they still lost A LOT of performance.
The backwards compatibility of the PS2 was due to the PS2 literally including an extra PS1 CPU (technically PS1-like CPU underclocked to match the original PS1 CPU when running PS1 games). On PS2 games this PS1 CPU handled only I/O so it wasn't completely wasted when running PS2 games.
The PS2 CPU is a MIPS III while the PS1 CPU is a MIPS I. I am not an expert but I think but I think MIPS III is only backwards compatible to MIPS II, not MIPS I
"Nintendo has had a trend for the past couple decades of releasing "sequel" consoles that are essentially a modernized version of the old one with extra features, compatible with everything that released on the predecessor."
Isnt it pretty much just the Wii and Wii U? I guess you could play GameCube disks on a Wii but calling the Wii a modernized version of the GameCube is a real stretch.
GB/GBc/GBa, DS/3DS (we don't talk about DSi) come to mind if you count them as consoles. You can even play GBa in the original DS, but not in the 3DS as far as I know.
The Wii is pretty much a souped up Gamecube, hardware wise. the GPU, Hollywood (Wii) is a faster Flipper (GameCube). The CPU is an IBM PPC Broadwell, the direct successor to the Gekko in the GameCube. Memory, etc. The only difference is the controllers, really. And even then, since everything was external including the IR bar, there wouldn't be much preventing you from doing this on the GameCube. The very reason you can pop in a GameCube game in it and have it run without emulation is because... It's the same, but faster. Same thing that the Switch and Switch 2 will be.
It's not a "stretch", it is exactly that. It's widely known by anyone familiar with the hardware that Gamecube and Wii are basically the same console: it's the exact same architecture but the Wii has upgraded/faster components and (this whas the key:) different peripherals and bet on the motion controls. It's more or less like comparing the Intel 386SX with 20 MHz and the AMD 386DX with 40 MHz.
You could just ask the developers of Dolphin (Gamecube/Wii emulator). There's a reason for why the same emulator can emulate both consoles.
The Mac is a weird counter example here, the move to 64 bits resulted in many games with official Mac ports (e.g. most of Valve's: Half Life, Portal, etc) no longer being able to run on modern versions of OSX
I'm certainly not blaming game makers in general because of the situation of Apple dropping 32bit Intel support, but I think Valve is a different story:
- They've been very diligent in the past about keeping their games up to date.
- Valve owning Steam means their flagship games are a strong signal about macOS support on Steam.
- If they really wanted, they could; they certainly have the resources to do so should they want to+; which means, they don't want to, which is a signal in the other direction: they stopped caring about macOS.
macOS is actually notorious for lack of binary compatibility. Most commercial apps are online distributed, and most non-commercial are open source, so they're quickly updated and compatibility issues are less often noticed.
It definitely shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, and should be the obvious choice to make on Nintendo's side too...
But it's probably worth noting that it's Nintendo we're talking about, and the games industry as a whole. They have a tendency to make questionable decisions that people could immediately tell were questionable decisions, either for anti consumer reasons or just not knowing the market.
So while the odds of the Switch 2 being backwards compatible were really high, and we all knew it was the obvious choice to make, there was still always a worry that it wouldn't happen for some ridiculous reason or another.
I always find interesting the issue regarding PC gaming on the rise, because in the Iberian Penisula game consoles never were that big.
We grew from the 8 bit home computers, lived through 16 bit home computers and settled in PC gaming.
Nintendo was mostly about those game & watch handhelds, naturally SEGA and PlayStation became relevant, replaced by XBox and PlayStation, but always on the shadow of PC gaming.
Although the handhelds have been backwards compatible, only the Wii and the Wii U had backwards compatibility. The SNES, N64, Gamecube and Switch did not have backwards compatibility.
The SNES and the Gamecube did have the Super Game Boy and Game Boy Player respectively though, but I'd probably count that as sideward compatibility rather than backward compatibility.
Lucky for you Fortnite is and always has been a free game. If you were foolish enough to pay to dress up your characters well then thank you for supporting that business model so I can let my kids play for free.
Power to you if you can afford to drop money on digital clothing for a game you spend on what ever you like. But I just see it as bad a smoking. Kids are like junkies wanting to buy clothing for a game mean while them and their parents are living in rags. It’s an addiction and kids are put up against their peers or will be on the outside if they can’t get the latest skin. So stupid it went that way and any game that has kids playing it should not allow in game purchases like that.
Part of it is that consoles are just PCs now. There is absolutely no excuse to not be backwards compatible in the current day.
But by the same token, consumers are realizing that consoles are just a less useful version of a gaming PC. The real deal has infinitely more utility for not much more money. Console makers are trying to sweeten the pot (or staunch the bleeding) by artificially expanding their library with prior generation games. At least until they get bored and decide to black hole all those same games, Sega.
Frankly I don't see any point to consoles anymore apart from the Console Experience(TM). A PC does it better, faster, cheaper, with literally more games than your entire extended family can play in their combined lifetimes. It also does literally anything else you could want.
A console plays games and streams Netflix and that's about it. It has an artificially limited number of titles, and after a point will never get more and will become a stupidly expensive paperweight. A gaming PC can be useful for over a decade with no upgrades.
Especially since couch co-op is no longer a thing game studios are interested in, there's just no point. I don't expect to ever buy another console.
The hard part of emulating the Switch 2 probably isn't going to be the actual emulation, but breaking the security so that the games and firmware can be extracted and decrypted. Nintendo pretty much nailed their software security with the Switch 1 but were undone by catastrophic hardware bugs, so we'll have to see how well they learned their lesson on the hardware front next time.
Microsoft and Sony have demonstrated that hardware security can be more or less perfected, neither of their systems have been compromised via hardware attacks for several generations now.
The main hardware security bugs[0] were very low hanging fruit associated with taking over the boot chain at ring 0- it's more likely that Nintendo themselves were in a rush to get the product on the market after the perceived failure of the Wii U. Even with a secure software stack, people found a way to defeat the Xbox 360 hardware[1] by physically drilling into a chip that enforced a software lock, and George Hotz became known for his work in finding ECDSA flaws in the PS3. Companies can design these locks to last for a few years of a console's lifespan, but I think people now are determined enough to dive into these difficult problems that they're unlikely to be secured forever.
Microsoft and Sony have successfully prevented their systems from being jtaged or mod-chipped. Not sure you can prevent dumping the actual game binary on the internet. That has lots of software and hardware attack vectors and only needs to be done once by a professional enthusiast.
The modern versions of the switch with those catastrophic bugs patched are still hackable though through mod chips. It's too hard for the casual user to install, but it's plenty accessible for a hacker who just wants to dump ROMs and reverse engineer the OS.
Even if the software is absolutely bulletproof, you can hack almost everything by modifying the hardware. Cutting the power of the CPU for a tiny amount of time for example can cause it to glitch in a way that bypasses the security checks. This is accessible enough for at least one person to get in and dump games.
There's also the fact that their games keep leaking a week or 2 head of release, so people can play them earlier and with better performance by downloading the leaked game and playing on an emulator.
I think Nintendo has a case to make that Switch emulation is costing them real money.
They're being purposely coy though on what this actually means. Backwards compatibility with digital/e-games, or backwards compatible with the physical carts?
I'd be shocked if it doesn't support physical carts, given Nintendo's history with backwards compatibility. And given the rough equivalence of digital games and carts on the Switch, I'm hoping that means digital purchases transfer too - but that would be a first for Nintendo, I think. Fingers crossed!
From what I understand, people are much more into physical media in Japan. Nintendo also actually finishes their games and gets a working build ready before release so the carts actually have a game on them that don't require a patch, which is unfortunately not standard across the industry.
There isn't a technical reason to change the cartridge format. I don't see why they wouldn't just use the same carts if backwards compatibility is the goal.
There are now cart dumpers that can copy and store multiple Switch games on an SD card. If the same form factor is used its likely these will still work for original Switch games.
I don't game nearly as much anymore but my understanding is that Nintendo may be the last console maker to regularly produce physical games. Newest Xbox doesn't even have an optical disk drive, I believe?
Nintendo also seems to be the least price gouge-y, in terms of lootboxes and microtransactions and other bullshit. Now I wish that didn't come with the tradeoff of them being completely anal when it comes to people posting OSTs online but I guess I'll take it.
The newest Xbox model doesn't have any new features; they stripped the drive so they could offer a lower-cost model. And while the newest PlayStation model doesn't have a drive, they sell one separately. So physical games are still alive and well for all three competitors.
It would really be surprising if it wasn't backwards compatible. The Switch breaking backwards compatibility was exceptional, apart from that every Nintendo console since the Wii on the stationary side and the GameBoy Color on the handheld side had at least one generation of backwards compatibility.
That's an oddly cherry-picked version of a pattern. There was no compatibility between the NES, SNES, N64, or GameCube. Wii and Wii U each supported their predecessor's games, but the Switch did not. Those 2 out of 7 were outliers
The important part is that backwards compatibility became a focus after the Gamecube and it has been ever since. Like, this is just a fact. The Wii supported Gamecube games and controllers. Even the WiiU had the internal capability to run GC games, it just lacked the disc drive for it, and it ran Wii games just fine. The same goes for every single of their portable consoles (GB games work on the GBC, GB and GBC games work on the GBA, GBA games work on the Nintendo DS, etc).
Huh, I'd been assuming the Switch 2 would be AMD Z2 based. I guess they've managed to convince nVidia to make them another SoC. A little surprised, would have thought nVidia would want to use any spare fab time for AI chips, though maybe they have some older process capacity?
The basis for the rumour is basically Linux kernel code and other leaks/hacks for a "T239" SoC that seemingly has all the streamlining and features you'd want for a mobile gaming processor (as opposed to a automotive SoC like the T234 it's supposedly derived from).
I imagine something like the Switch is a great revenue stream for nvidia. It's relatively easy work and they'll be minting Switch 2s, thus paying licensing fees, well into the 2030s.
Even if they don't need that money, it's still good to deny the competition of such a lucrative contract.
There are some hints that Nvidia wants to seriously enter the ARM CPU market (again)? Switch guarantees high demand/volume regardless of anything else. Not clear how lucrative the contract is on its own, though.
Presumably it will reduce their current gross margins (which won't necessarily look great in their quarterly report. Nvidia's total revenue is only ~20% higher than Intel's was back in 2021 despite the insane valuations (in large part due to their obscene margins).
Nintendo optimizes for cost, not maximum performance and almost always selects older technology. AMD Z2 chips go into $600+ bulky low margin PC gaming handhelds whereas Nintendo likely will want to hit $300-350 while keeping a healthy margin.
This also means that the Switch SoC doesn't use an expensive cutting edge manufacturing process. And it probably won't be made in TSMC factories at all. Leaks pretty clearly indicate an Nvidia Ampere based SoC built on Samsung's 8nm process, so it's the same tech as Nvidia's consumer line circa 2020.
As usual with Nintendo products, they will not use the best / fastest chips available, but older ones where the production capacity is not that constrained.
I’ve got to assume that fab capacity for SoC ships verses H100s are two different things. With the automotive industry down there could be spare capacity ?
The Switch SoC is now built on a 16nm process, so there's no need to go for the cutting edge to achieve a sizable improvement. The Samsung fabs Nvidia relied on until very recently could do the job.
Because it is a mobile console, therefore battery life is a limitation and adding an extra layer of indirection (and therefore, work) will drain that battery faster.
I really love when backwards compatibility is incorporated in new products. I’m pleasantly surprised because Nintendo has been bit so many times. For example GameCube compatibility on Wii is why we had hacked Wii so quickly.
Unfortunately it looks like they will again use a very outdated SoC, likely one that doesn't even match a several years old Steam Deck. Probably an 8nm chip, based on Nvidia's outdated Ampere architecture. See e.g. here https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/1fjy...
Which would mean the SoC is even more outdated than the Switch 1 SoC was at launch. Reason is probably that Nintendo originally wanted to release the new hardware significantly earlier.
I really don't understand why they are planning those chips apparently many years in advance, when some other manufacturer (AMD, Qualcomm, Intel, MediaTek) could have supplied a more modern SoC without many modifications in a relatively short timeframe at a better price than Nvidia.
This would have made backwards compatibility more difficult, but I don't think this is that big of an issue anyway. Nintendo often didn't have it in the past, and few people complained. After all, old games can still be played on the old hardware.
The fact that the Switch 1 SoC is so outdated now is the main reason the console is replaced with a Switch 2. E.g. there a fewer and fewer cross-platform releases that come to the Switch. So having an outdated SoC means shaving of years of the console's potential life span.
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With all three major console manufacturers prioritizing backwards compatibility, and the rise in PC gaming (universally backwards compatible), people are starting to catch on to the fact that old games don't "expire" after 10 years. I wouldn't be surprised if backwards compatibility just becomes the standard for all gaming consoles going forward.
Tangential, but I'm also interested in seeing how games that released on old consoles and are continued to be played, like Fortnite, will support aging hardware. I don't like that Epic can one day announce the game just no longer works on that console, rendering your purchases null and void until you upgrade your hardware, but I can't expect them to update that version of the game forever.
That hardware can no longer compete with platforms that don't throw away their entire library on every release is probably one of the first impacts of games finally maturing. My "next console" was a Steam Deck for partially this very reason, the fact that it came preloaded with years of previous acquisitions.
We're also just seeing the leading edge of the game industry having to deal with the fact that it now has to compete against itself. There's been a number of articles about how $NEW_GAME never even reached a peak player count of something like Skyrim. I think that's currently being written as a sort of a "ha ha, that's sorta funny", but it represents a real problem. It is not unsolvable; Hollywood has always faced this issue and it has historically managed to make money anyhow. But I think AAA gaming is only just beginning to reckon with the fact that they aren't going to get a "free reset" on every console generation. $NEW_GAME really is is competition with Skyrim now, along with a lot of other things. It's not a joke, it's an emerging reality the industry is going to have to grapple with.
I completely agree but I would actually extend this principle even more aggressively. Even if, for whatever reason, we were hard capped technologically at Windows 98, even that space could be fruitfully explored practically without end, creating new genres, new stories, new games.
Fiction writing carries on just fine in books, and music has certainly benefited from new tech and new methods but there would always be music even if that weren't the case, and same with cinema. I would put tabletop games in this category too. Its continued future viability, independent of future tech advancements may be an important factor in settling whether its art.
Full credit to Nintendo for recognizing they had plenty of unused creative space to play in, and choosing to play by different rules.
I've said before that I've got a list of games going back 20-odd years that I'd like to play through in retirement, so I'm not the target market, but for online multiplayer games there needs to be a player base that makes it worthwhile, and the swarms are fickle and fast-moving. Helldivers 2 being a recent example to where a large community swarmed.
Having said that, and as someone else pointed out, enduring games like Fortnite will have to cut off certain aging hardware at some point if it's to remain a viable magnet to the swarms.
Aside: I used to go to LANs back in the Quake2 days, and was annoyed with Counterstrike because it essentially halved the player pool of Q2 FFA fragfests. The fragmentation of the market has only continued since then, but the market has also greatly increased in size. I did very much enjoy the unchained chaos of large scale Q2/Q3 FFA and Rocket Arena. Good times.
It's harder for video games, because movies take only a couple hours to finish, and you generally want something you haven't seen before each movie night. Video games can take hundreds of hours to play to completion, and some games you can enjoy replaying tens of thousands of times. So the competition from the existing games library is very tough.
That's not true at all, many games don't bother with the Switch at all because of dev costs, and Fortnite, one of the most popular games in the world, is struggling on the Switch. I know because I play FN on Switch occasionally, and you can quite literally see all the pain that went into making all that complexity work at approx 25fps.
Even Nintendo can't make the latest Zeldas run at >30fps, and they're relatively low fidelity.
I've been organizing LAN parties with my friends for 26 years now and around 2010 to 2016 was the time when games became so good that stopped making sense to upgrade in-between LAN parties.
- Left 4 Dead 2
- Killing Floor 2
- CS:GO
- Grid 2
- GTA V
- StarCraft II
plus nowadays there's stiff free competition, e.g.
- Rocket League
- Brawlhalla
- Dota 2
- LoL
but also from OpenRA, which modernizes Red Alert.
Plus, it's challenging to tell based on screenshots if you're looking at Assassin's Creed III (from 2012) or Assassin's Creed Mirage (from 2023) and there's been 7 !!! other Assassin's Creed games in between.
And looking at the Switch, I'd say the situation for new games is brutal. There's lots of evergreen games with great replay-ability and thanks to the cartridges you can easily borrow them among a group of friends. It's been a while since I last bought a new one because there just wasn't anything different enough from what I already have and like.
My biggest wish for the Switch has been that it'll one day drive my screen at 144Hz to make movement smooth. And it looks like Nintendo is going to deliver exactly that: More powerful hardware for the same old games.
I wonder if Nintendo will also eventually be forced to implement a subscription model and/or if they will start to aggressively push older games without updates out of their store (like what Apple does) because otherwise I just don't see many openings for developers to build a new Switch game and make the financials work. Currently, you're competing with a back catalogue of 4,747 games, so good luck finding anything where you can stand out by being better.
This was something that confused me about the concept of consoles in the 90s. The nonexistent value proposition of a console hasn't changed since then.
I assume they serve two purposes:
(1) They're marketed as toys you might buy for someone as a gift.
(2) You might own a console if you don't want to own a computer.
Purpose (2) seems to have withered and died.
> There's been a number of articles about how $NEW_GAME never even reached a peak player count of something like Skyrim. I think that's currently being written as a sort of a "ha ha, that's sorta funny", but it represents a real problem. It is not unsolvable; Hollywood has always faced this issue and it has historically managed to make money anyhow.
One major aspect of copyright law is making it difficult for people to consume media from the past.
Consoles used to have very bespoke architectures, but now are switching to customized versions of relatively off-the-shelf components. Both the PS5 and the last XBox use x86 AMD CPU+GPU combos, probably a variation of their regular G product line.
Traditionally for these "Live Service"-type games, they announce cutting support for a console, but let you carry your purchases in that specific game (subscription, add-on items, etc), forward to the same game on the next gen of that console.
For example, how Final Fantasy 14 ended PS3 support - https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/-i-final-fantas... and how Grand Theft Auto 5 ended PS3 support - https://www.ign.com/articles/gta-online-support-ending-xbox-...
It's not a guarantee, but I'd expect something similar for Fortnite.
Backwards compatibility is very "cheap" these days though? With no arcane architectures and chip designs. PS5 and Xbox are basically just generic PCs running a restricted OS and Switch is just a phone/tablet.
If the GPU access is through a relatively "thick" API like DX/Vulkan and shaders stored in an intermediate representation like DXIL or SPIR-V, sure, swapping out the hardware implementation is relatively easy.
But if they're shipping GPU ISA binaries as the shaders, you'll have a much harder time ensuring compatibility.
Same with things like synchronization, on both the CPU and GPU (and any other offload devices like DSPs or future NPUs). If they use API-provided mechanisms, and those are used /correctly/, then the implementation can likely be changed. But if they cycle-count and rely on specific device timing, again all bets are off.
Things like DX12 and Vulkan have a large number of sync points and state transition metadata to allow different implementations to be "correct" in things like cache or format conversions (like compression). Not all those transitions are required for every vendor's hardware, and we regularly see issues caused by apps not "correctly" using them when the spec says it's required, as the vendor's hardware they happened to test on didn't require that one specific transition that another implementation might, or they happened across some timing that didn't happen to hit issues.
I guess my point is Compatibility is hard even if the APIs are intentionally designed to allow it. I have no idea how much the idea of such compatibility has been baked into console APIs in the first place. One of the primary advantages of consoles is to allow simplifications allowed by targeting limited hardware, so I can only assume they're less compatibility focused than the PC APIs we already have Big Problems with.
When apple switched to ARM even with x64->ARMv8 translation layer (NOT emulating) it was still noticeably slow in a lot of software. Even though some x64 games worked on ARM macs they still lost A LOT of performance.
The backwards compatibility of the PS2 was due to the PS2 literally including an extra PS1 CPU (technically PS1-like CPU underclocked to match the original PS1 CPU when running PS1 games). On PS2 games this PS1 CPU handled only I/O so it wasn't completely wasted when running PS2 games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2_technical_specif...
The PS2 CPU is a MIPS III while the PS1 CPU is a MIPS I. I am not an expert but I think but I think MIPS III is only backwards compatible to MIPS II, not MIPS I
Isnt it pretty much just the Wii and Wii U? I guess you could play GameCube disks on a Wii but calling the Wii a modernized version of the GameCube is a real stretch.
The graphics chip was even fixed-function, like the Gamecube's, not shader-based like the Xbox 360 or PS3.
You could just ask the developers of Dolphin (Gamecube/Wii emulator). There's a reason for why the same emulator can emulate both consoles.
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- They've been very diligent in the past about keeping their games up to date.
- Valve owning Steam means their flagship games are a strong signal about macOS support on Steam.
- If they really wanted, they could; they certainly have the resources to do so should they want to+; which means, they don't want to, which is a signal in the other direction: they stopped caring about macOS.
+ HL1 has a FOSS engine that apparently supports it, and more: https://github.com/FWGS/xash3d-fwgs/blob/master/Documentatio...
But it's probably worth noting that it's Nintendo we're talking about, and the games industry as a whole. They have a tendency to make questionable decisions that people could immediately tell were questionable decisions, either for anti consumer reasons or just not knowing the market.
So while the odds of the Switch 2 being backwards compatible were really high, and we all knew it was the obvious choice to make, there was still always a worry that it wouldn't happen for some ridiculous reason or another.
We grew from the 8 bit home computers, lived through 16 bit home computers and settled in PC gaming.
Nintendo was mostly about those game & watch handhelds, naturally SEGA and PlayStation became relevant, replaced by XBox and PlayStation, but always on the shadow of PC gaming.
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But by the same token, consumers are realizing that consoles are just a less useful version of a gaming PC. The real deal has infinitely more utility for not much more money. Console makers are trying to sweeten the pot (or staunch the bleeding) by artificially expanding their library with prior generation games. At least until they get bored and decide to black hole all those same games, Sega.
Frankly I don't see any point to consoles anymore apart from the Console Experience(TM). A PC does it better, faster, cheaper, with literally more games than your entire extended family can play in their combined lifetimes. It also does literally anything else you could want.
A console plays games and streams Netflix and that's about it. It has an artificially limited number of titles, and after a point will never get more and will become a stupidly expensive paperweight. A gaming PC can be useful for over a decade with no upgrades.
Especially since couch co-op is no longer a thing game studios are interested in, there's just no point. I don't expect to ever buy another console.
Microsoft and Sony have demonstrated that hardware security can be more or less perfected, neither of their systems have been compromised via hardware attacks for several generations now.
[0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unpatchable-hardware-exploit-l...
[1] https://gbatemp.net/threads/scanned-drilling-template-16d4s-...
Even if the software is absolutely bulletproof, you can hack almost everything by modifying the hardware. Cutting the power of the CPU for a tiny amount of time for example can cause it to glitch in a way that bypasses the security checks. This is accessible enough for at least one person to get in and dump games.
When it comes to video games. That's not much of a demonstration in the grand scheme of things.
I think Nintendo has a case to make that Switch emulation is costing them real money.
As for people choosing an emulator over buying a Switch: too bad, that's how competition works.
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http://i.imgur.com/OQLR0xM.jpg
- smaller
- energy efficient
- cost saving
and they are all valid reasons, it's a handheld, the form factor will evolve until perfected
Nintendo also seems to be the least price gouge-y, in terms of lootboxes and microtransactions and other bullshit. Now I wish that didn't come with the tradeoff of them being completely anal when it comes to people posting OSTs online but I guess I'll take it.
Gameboy Color supported OG Gameboy games
GBA supported GBC games
DS supported GBA and(?) GBC games - Could be wrong about that
3DS supported DS games.
Now we've arrived at a fairly locked in set of architectures.
https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-inside-nvidias...
The basis for the rumour is basically Linux kernel code and other leaks/hacks for a "T239" SoC that seemingly has all the streamlining and features you'd want for a mobile gaming processor (as opposed to a automotive SoC like the T234 it's supposedly derived from).
The Samsung fab is based on T234 being fabbed by Samsung using a ~5 year old process, and Korean industry rumours (https://m-mk-co-kr.translate.goog/news/business/10999380?_x_...).
Even if they don't need that money, it's still good to deny the competition of such a lucrative contract.
Presumably it will reduce their current gross margins (which won't necessarily look great in their quarterly report. Nvidia's total revenue is only ~20% higher than Intel's was back in 2021 despite the insane valuations (in large part due to their obscene margins).
This also means that the Switch SoC doesn't use an expensive cutting edge manufacturing process. And it probably won't be made in TSMC factories at all. Leaks pretty clearly indicate an Nvidia Ampere based SoC built on Samsung's 8nm process, so it's the same tech as Nvidia's consumer line circa 2020.
Bonus if they invent an AI that can fix the crash bugs in the binary.
Which would mean the SoC is even more outdated than the Switch 1 SoC was at launch. Reason is probably that Nintendo originally wanted to release the new hardware significantly earlier.
I really don't understand why they are planning those chips apparently many years in advance, when some other manufacturer (AMD, Qualcomm, Intel, MediaTek) could have supplied a more modern SoC without many modifications in a relatively short timeframe at a better price than Nvidia.
This would have made backwards compatibility more difficult, but I don't think this is that big of an issue anyway. Nintendo often didn't have it in the past, and few people complained. After all, old games can still be played on the old hardware.