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Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]

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781 points HelloUsername | 2 comments | 16 Jan 25 13:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.663s | source
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wat10000 ◴[16 Jan 25 14:12 UTC] No.42725342[source]▶
It seems like the days of revolutionary consumer electronics are over.

This looks nice, for sure. But it’s really more of the same. Not surprising. It does surprise me that there’s such emphasis on it, though. There’s the name, of course, and then the entire video is based around “it’s the same thing but a little better.”

Game console updates used to be big deals. The SNES was a revolution. PS2 was huge. Now… PS5? What’s different from PS4, again? Is there a 6? What’s different about that?

I don’t blame Nintendo or the others. I have no idea what they could do here they would be revolutionary. I think the design space has just been thoroughly explored by now and that’s where we are.

This pattern repeats all over the place. TVs are maxed out, with better visual quality than people care about, and size limited by wall space. Computers get a little faster every year. This year’s phones are last year’s phones with a minor performance bump and slightly better cameras. And again, I don’t see what they can do better, and that’s probably how it has to be at this point.

But it’s still a little shocking to see a company lean so far into the theme of “we made incremental improvements to this thing we released 8 years ago.”

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1. hibikir ◴[16 Jan 25 15:49 UTC] No.42726869[source]▶
This all comes down to what the hardware improvements can mean in practice. It's not as if hardware isn't moving up, but that the new kinds of things double the hardware unlocks are much smaller than they used to be.

This is best seen on the PC market. What a gaming desktop today has running on it is, compute wise, unimaginably stronger than the best available 10-20 years ago. The increases in hardware just keep coming. But there's limits on how much more you can get out of being able to push more polygons, or to put more pixels on screen. We can do all kinds of extra photorealistic things in real time that before would have to be done only in movies, and rendered in server farms for weeks at a time. But the increased difficulty doesn't quite match how impressive the extra effects are.

You can also notice this by just playing old games, and seeing how they hold up. We can make 2d pixel art games that are much better than what a SNES could do, but many of those games still hold up just fine. Meanwhile most 3d games of the Playstation and even the PS2 era are downright painful, because the increases in power between generations back then lead to big practical differences in capability. A ps5 is much stronger than a ps4, hardware wise, but it didn't unlock much at all. All the extra power can get you cooler reflections on cyberpunk, and you can go even further with a PC that has over $1000 in video cards in it. But those reflections and atmospheric effects are eating up as much hardware as the rest of the game.

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2. wat10000 ◴[16 Jan 25 18:03 UTC] No.42728629[source]▶
It’s some of each. Hardware is improving substantially slower than it used to. And at the same time, what you get out of better hardware has hit steeply diminishing returns.