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Nintendo Switch Will Launch On March 3rd For $299, Won't Feature Region-Locking Software (cnet.com)
Nintendo has released more details about its upcoming Nintendo Switch gaming console. We have learned that the console will be launching on March 3rd worldwide, and in North America the console will be available for $299.99. What's more is that it won't feature region-locking for software, meaning you can play games from any region no matter where you buy your console. CNET reports: There will also be a Nintendo Switch online service that will be a paid service. It will launch as a trial with pricing to be announced later in 2017. For fans of imports of Japanese exclusives, it was announced the new system will have no region locking -- a big break from tradition for Nintendo. The Switch itself is said to have battery life from 2.5 to 6 hours and can be charged over USB-C. Nintendo says it will have portable battery accessories also available to charge on the go. The Joy-con is the name for new controller, usable in a combined controller style or separated into two halves to let two players play together. It will also be available in a range of colors for people who want to mix things up. The Joy-con has a whole bunch of clever tricks -- motion control, IR sensor, haptic feedback -- and a series of 'versus' game ideas called "1, 2, Switch" that let you play games (like a quick draw shooting game) without needing to look at the screen, just face each other down with the Joy-con controllers. Other games announced that need you to keep the full Joy-con all to yourself include 'Arms', a robotic boxing battle game, and Splatoon 2. Plus the new Mario game, Super Mario Odyssey, which aims to deliver a 'sandbox' experience across many realms outside the Mushroom kingdom, including the real world. And this time his cap has come to life. For the more serious RPG fans, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was also announced for the Nintendo Switch. Followed by a very small tease for Fire Emblem Warriors. All up, Nintendo says there are over 80 games in development for the Nintendo Switch. If you live in New York, "a limited quantity of pre-orders for the #NintendoSwitch will begin on 1/13 at 9AM while supplies last," Nintendo NY tweeted.
You're dead to me, Nintendo.
I hope "region free" means I can easily purchase games from other regions on the online shop.
Pay to play online when your prior consoles were FREE (and even then, MP was risky at best) and then in your lineup are several games that were notoriously bad MP-wise/connection-wise on the prior generations? (DBZ as an example.)
Nope! Lost sale.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It's nice when a company decides not to screw us for a change.
I don't even mean that sarcastically for once.
It needs a classic game boy emulator.
...and cram it up up your wazoo.
Well console users, it looks like 2017 is the year of the PC Master Race. All your console are belong to us!.
I know Nintendo likes to make a profit on hardware sales, but people are unlikely to purchase an expensive portable. They had problems selling the 3DS at $250.
They should be cutting the unit price by any means necessary, even if that means selling the base station separately.
It has a 1280x720 6.2" capacitive touchscreen, and the battery will last ~3 hours when running typical games. Zelda is coming out on launch, 3/3, and same day on Wii U. It has 32GB internal storage, and the two SKUs differ only by joy-con color scheme. The storage is expandable by microSDXC cards, presumably eshop games can be directly installed onto them like the 3ds (unlike the Wii U.)
More detailed hardware specs (RAM?) have yet to be revealed, though. I'm particularly curious if it's more graphically powerful than the Wii U.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
The video says "Holiday 2017" for Mario Odyssey, and if history is any indication, there will be delays. Launch lineup is very likely going to be primarily cross-platform ports and Zelda Breath of the Wild.
Still, that will be enough to sell a lot of units, and provide a lot of great entertainment, just don't expect an avalanche of first-party top content out the gate this time. It'll appear in pretty wide intervals, but when they're putting their focus on something, the quality level from Nintendo tends to beat just about anyone outside of Blizzard and a few other top-end developers.
I skipped the WiiU since none of the first-party games appealed to me - no Mario Galaxy/Metroid Prime/Zelda games - Pikmin was cool, but not enough, and I despise time limits on open world games. The switch, however, I'm seriously considering picking up, if only for a nice open world Zelda game and eventually the Xenoblade/Mario games. Here's hoping they bring back the Metroid Prime team, and make Metroid Other M retroactively (pun intented) non-canon.
Ryan Fenton
So that's one audience this thing doesn't seem pitched for.
But perhaps people with consoles will like it? Except that even when docked, performance is likely to be terrible compared to rival consoles from Microsoft and Sony. Aside from that the device will be gimped by the same storage space issues that crippled the Wii U. So patches, DLC and all the usual stuff which people expect from a console won't happen.
So who the hell is supposed to be the target audience for this thing? Perhaps a Switch Mini will turn up in a year or so and make more sense of the platform. Maybe even a console-only variant. But as it stands it looks like a stupidly expensive not-very-portable, not-very-performant-console device.
It's hard to see this being a major success, outside of the (aging, shrinking) Nintendo hardcore. The consensus on gaming sites (and their forums) seems to reinforce this. So do the markets; Nintendo's stocks have fallen around 5.75% since the reveal.
The stock price shift will almost certainly have been driven by the price. It's higher than expected by at least $50 (and realistically closer to $100). Sony and MS got away with even higher prices when they were launching the PS4 and XB1, for sure. However, those consoles were significantly more powerful than their predecessors. They also launched at the same time as each other. So in essence, there were two expensive consoles without many games in direct competition with each other, which actually negated those disadvantages a bit. Nintendo are launching a less powerful console against two cheaper and well-entrenched mid-cycle consoles with extensive games libraries. That's going to be tough.
The launch games line-up is also poor. Zelda looks pretty good, but there is a cheaper Wii-U version also available that doesn't look appreciably worse. The rest of the launch window looks pretty pants. The XB1 and the PS4 had the same problem, of course, but again, their near-simultaneous launch actually offset that as a problem.
Beyond the launch-window, the games lineup is nothing special. The same first party range that didn't do much to help the Wii-U. A couple of more interesting (but still niche) second party titles like Xenoblade 2. Third party support from a few companies with a long-standing relationship with the Nintendo DS line (like Atlus), whose games aren't yet even confirmed for release outside of Japan. And a tentative dip of a toe in the water from EA. The poor specs, eccentric hardware and unusual control configurations are going to put a lot of other third party developers off.
I think the console itself is also going to be very hard to market. It's not quite clear what the USP here is. The thing looks large and clunky by handheld standards; more awkward than a tablet or even a PS Vita. As a home console, it's badly underpowered compared to the competition. Nobody has quite explained yet why the hybrid configuration is such a good thing, and the attempts to date to do so have been toe-curling.
On the plus side, it's region-free. That's actually pretty huge news and is a sign that even the most authoritarian of the platform owners is now being forced to open up a little. I might actually buy one just to reward that, because the fear is that if the Switch fails horribly (as I fear it might), then Nintendo will swing back to region locking in future. But it is really hard right now to see a pathway to this thing being a success.
The difference is, PC multiplayer games often have servers that you can get running later on.
It's only the MMO's that tend to go offline.
I can still setup a SvenCoop server using the HL engine, or play many games where the service has gone offline. Direct TCP/IP connectivity for an awful lot of them.
It's not that it doesn't happen. But with consoles, it happens EVERY generation for almost all the games. Games are abandoned when sequels or new platforms come out and there's nothing you can do.
Hell, I can still load up AOE2 and host a server, even without having to buy the HD-version-remake on Steam (which just makes it easier so I don't have to faff with DirectPlay or whatever it was called.
The only online game I know in my Steam account (1000 games) doesn't work at all is Age of Booty - based on GameSpy But I'm sure if I cared enough there's a patch, hack, or VPN-like thing that would make it work somehow.
Companies go bust and auth servers go with them, sure, but a lot of PC games support LAN or direct TCP which means you can play them over anything that carry such packets across the world. There are products and software that exist entirely for that purpose.
I am completely unsold on a phone chip for a home console. Yes it's portable, but it's also a home device.
"Science is the power of man"
you haven't had any major improvements in competative hardware for 6+ years, you sat on your arse releasing the same games over and over (mario/kart/zelda)
sooner or later are you going to realise that eventually we are sick of the repeats.
$299 gets a top end android tablet, higher rez,better battery etc. why the hell did you bother.
After dealing with the Wii and 3DS and the Nintendo account system I don't intend to buy a new Nintendo system till they get that figured out. Having to spend 2 hours with customer support to transfer my account from my old 3DS to a New 3DS is not an experience I'm looking to repeat ever. They need to follow catch up with Steam, PSN, and XBL, and make that easier before I'd even consider them again.
Who releases a console just after Christmas, when everyone just spent their money on a shiny new XBox One S or Playstation 4 Slim?
Probably a company that learned from the supply crunches and scalping that plagued the Wii in 2006 and NES Classic Edition in 2016. The idea as I see it is that by fourth quarter 2017, there will be enough Nintendo Switch consoles in the channel that console scalpers don't interfere with selling games to users.
Making a game that targets the XB1, PS4 and PC is a no brainer. That's because these platforms are close enough (i.e. parity) [...] If the Switch is NOT at parity then the obvious outcome is that it will cost more money to develop for that platform
How close is the Nintendo Switch to performance parity with integrated graphics on laptop PCs? Because that's how I see the analogy between the console world and the user-programmable computer world: PlayStation 4 is like a desktop PC, Nintendo Switch is like a laptop, and PlayStation Vita or New Nintendo 3DS is like an Android phone.
when they were actually competing for the #1 spot. Gamecube sort of falls into this category, but (i) it was released way too late, (ii) disc capacity was gimped, and (iii) had an atypical controller which was troublesome for some genres.
Unless you're fighting for the top spot, you get pretty crap 3rd party support, and while Nintendo's 1st party games tend to be good, theyre not enough to float a system exclusively. 2nd party support (like Rare used to be) is pretty much zilch.
Nintendo has been getting increasingly insular over the decades, and it's doing damage to their IPs. Feels like we're getting uninspired rehashes.
Nintendo may be making money here and there, but theyre also losing popularity overall. Aint a long term solution.
Because if you try to use a mobile chipset for a home console, you get OUYA. But did it fizzle because of its mobile chipset, or did it fizzle because of no first party games?
You need a smartphone for voice chat?
Really? I can think of two things wrong with this idea. A. people will already use voice chat apps on their phone, and not the one Nintendo (might) provide. B. This sounds like a violation of anti-tying provisions in the Magnusson-Moss warranty act.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Definitely not getting this for my kids when a $150 tablet and $35 protective case will give them just as much fun, with less expensive games. Keeping my Wii U for Zelda and Mario Kart... The new Super Mario Odyssey game looks wack anyway, it looks like I don't need anything from this system.
...reveals are the end of hype, end of sky high expectations, end of speculation in the news cycle. Reveals always precipitate a stock drop.
Twinstiq, game news
Weird it didn't take me long, and it didn't seem complex. A bit too much explaining even, I just wanted to bypass all the lengthy explainations in the process.
However, the ripoff of moving Virtual Console games from one system to another continues. Glad I never bought any and just kept my old systems and games.
How many kids who use this will have a cell phone? Personally I don't have one (and my kids obviously don't either) so I have no idea how we are going to use this. I have a tablet but no carrier, no sim card (no sim slot!).
Twinstiq, game news
NO deal.