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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: 0.001s | source
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joshstrange ◴[16 Jan 25 15:42 UTC] No.42726760[source]▶
At this point I'd be hard pressed to consider this over my Steam Deck. We will see the specs later but I doubt it will really compete processing-wise or screen-wise.

The openness (full arch desktop) of the Steam Deck is also awesome while having a great UI that you never have to leave if you don't want to.

EDIT: I mistakenly called it "fedora desktop", my bad

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dietr1ch ◴[16 Jan 25 17:34 UTC] No.42728270[source]▶
Nintendo does not compete on specs. They rely on the fact that fun is pretty much orthogonal to bleeding edge graphics.

They use that awareness and take advantage of simpler graphics to trade off processing power for features (portability, novelty) and profit (60>=usd games).

From time to time they also remind us that little hardware can do a lot if it's not running Chrome on a trench coat, and instead care is put in optimising things.

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1. mitthrowaway2 ◴[16 Jan 25 23:42 UTC] No.42732392[source]▶
This is true. But high specs are a big win anyway if it opens up access to a bigger library of 3rd party games.
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2. dietr1ch ◴[17 Jan 25 00:18 UTC] No.42732634[source]▶
That's true, but Nintendo's counter to that is exclusive games, and they have big series like Mario, Zelda, Smash Bros. There's also newer ones that are more niche, but at least for me it's just the game where some new Smash Bros character comes from.

With exclusives games, emulation can be a problem, but many Nintendo games also rely on the novel things on their platform. For instance the Mario Party series has always tried to use something (rumble, mic, touchscreen, controller's shape).

This makes it necessary to get the console, and once you get market share it'll be worth porting and optimising games for an under-powered console (Celeste, Hollow Knight and probably every game runs worse on the switch, but it's playable). I'm not a gamedev, but it seems that nowadays it's easier than ever to port games since in practice there's fewer architectures around.