Games Inbox: Will the Nintendo Switch 2 be a flop?

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One trick pony
I was surprised and disappointed at the Switch 2 leak from a few weeks ago. After all the talk about how unpredictable Nintendo is, the result is almost identical to the existing model, only bigger and faster. It may be what most gamers have been asking for, but I don’t see it shifting as many units as the current Switch. For a simple reason: the novelty is gone.

In my estimation, a big chunk of Switch sales, and the reason it continues to sell to this day, are due to families and young people. This segment will be in no rush to upgrade, especially if the current Switch will continue to support the most popular games, like Mario Kart 8, Fornite, Minecraft, etc. at a reasonable quality.

Another big segment are people who suffered from FOMO [fear of missing out] and wanted to see what the fuss was about. A majority of those will also be not willing to upgrade if they either did not like what they saw or felt that they had their fill with what the Switch already offered, especially if the price of the new device is much higher.

So, barring a mainstream killer app in the vein of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild, what we are left with are existing Nintendo fans and those who have been successfully sucked into the Nintendo ecosystem over the last seven years. Having a more powerful device with more third party support will have zero impact on this segment, as they already bought in.

My prediction, the Switch 2 may sell fast but will sell no more than 20-30 million units. Can Nintendo pull two rabbits from the same hat? We will wait and see.
Ali K

GC: You make some good points, but that sales prediction is getting close to Wii U levels, which seems unlikely.

Keep it
RE: Sean. I know where he’s coming from, about if he should sell on his limited edition PS5 Pro. I hate scalpers as well. The way that I’d look at it is if you need the money ASAP then sell it and make a profit. These days gaming isn’t what it was and things have changed, but if you don’t need the money and it will be just sat in a bank then I’d keep it, I really would. You have got a very special PS5 Pro that most of the world wants. Something so rare some would pay £5K in a heartbeat.

I’ll be honest, I was one that got two PlayStation 5 on pre-order at launch and I was going to sell one on for a profit, till my mate said he missed out due to being at work, so I sold him the spare at the same price as I paid.

What I’m saying, is if you don’t need the money, keep it; enjoy it. If you really do need the money then sell it but just remember once you sell it that’s, it it’s gone and you will never got your hands on one again. If it was me, soon as it came through my door I’d be setting it up and I’d sell my old PlayStation 5 for a few 100.
David

Keep it, then sell it
Interesting dilemma for the reader at the weekend, who managed to acquire the 30th anniversary PS5 Pro bundle pre-order. That bundle wasn’t available when I got in the queue, but I was always going for the standard PS5 Pro anyway (£700 is bad enough). I was never a fan of the grey colour for PS1, so the nostalgia doesn’t work on me.

My suggestion to Sean is don’t sell the pre-order. Sell it once you have it delivered and leave it sealed. I suspect you will get more money for it. Tangible evidence of purchase will be more convincing to sceptical buyers. The regular PS5 Pro hasn’t sold out, so it’s not as though you won’t have a replacement.

It was evident Sean didn’t set out to be a scalper, so his conscience is clear. It was no coincidence how quickly listings were up on eBay. Why didn’t Sony produce 30,000 units? It would have made more sense than the obscure 12,300, which only loosely reflects the release date.

Sony must have known scalpers would pick up the majority. I guess they wanted the free publicity. When people are selling their products for far more than they are worth, it only enhances their desirability.
Si

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Artificial Miyamoto
I find it hard to decide if Miyamoto‘s comment on not using AI is either him just saying what he thinks is popular, him not understanding what the different AI things are, or if he’s just the grumpy old man stubbornly saying, ‘we didn’t need these tools in my day’.

When you get beyond the tech demos of creating entire games with a text command and look at the AI products people are creating, they’re all essentially evolutions of products we’ve used for the last 20 years. Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot for devs is just a much more powerful autocomplete that can predict the next block of code rather than just the next word. Plus, a nice chat window effectively replacing google with answers that have the context of your codebase when you get a bit stuck.

Nintendo saying they’re not going to use these tools is just like banning the use of Excel and telling staff to manually add things up themselves. As more and more programmes add AI I also don’t really get how they’re going to avoid it. Are they really going abandon all leading dev and design tools?

Out of everyone I’d also expect Nintendo to be the people that could come up with a unique way to use the underlying tech for a new gameplay experience. The obvious idea would be to incorporate it into the next Mario Maker, maybe as a character creator for things like create me a Mario power-up as a frog who can jump a bit further. But I’m sure Nintendo could come up with something far better.

It’s not like AI just means replace a voice artist. On the tooling side they’re just autocomplete or Q&A tools that are really simple to use. They still need someone to prompt them to do something. And from the tech perspective it’s really open to people’s creativity to decide what they build with it.
Tim

GC: We doubt he meant a blanket ban, but thankfully there seems no likelihood of there being AI generated art or sound in a Nintendo game.

Political issues
After seeing the European sales figures for Concord I would love to know what lessons Sony has taken from all this. They went mental over Days Gone doing a bit worse than their other games, with no sequels and pushing the developer around, so what are they going to do now Concord has proven that being a Sony game means nothing in terms of guaranteed sales?

Looking at the comments it seems pretty much everyone is convinced they’ll completely ignore it and press on anyway, with almost nothing but live service games. I get it. I understand why you’d think that, but I really want to think they’re more sensible than that. I guess it depends on whether the new CEOs want to blame it all on Jim Ryan or not. Sad to think that office politics are now playing such a big part in the future of gaming.
Tacle

Stuck in the system
After the Redfall debacle Phil Spencer did some damage control interviews/podcasts bemoaning how Xbox’s hands were tied going toe to toe with Sony.

He argued releasing 11/10 games wouldn’t make people give up their PlayStation. Which is true but it would mean you sell more Xboxes. I thought this was a bit of a nonsense thing to say, in all honesty.

The other handicaps I felt were legitimate though, in Sony using their dominant position to secure third party exclusives, timed or otherwise. Also, that losing the last gen when many built up digital collections meant far more gamers were locked into PlayStation’s ecosystem than Xbox’s, including me.

I genuinely wonder if that locked in aspect will ever see me move over to PC, as I keep saying I will.

I’m currently playing through my PlayStation back catalogue before getting a PC. That’ll take a year or more. Whilst doing that there will always be some must-have game to pick up or I want to support like Astro Bot.

Now Microsoft is releasing games on PlayStation I genuinely don’t think I’ll miss out on many games with my current PlayStation 5 and Switch.

I’m also perfectly happy gaming on those two devices, even if I would appreciate the aspects PC would bring like better performance, mouse and keyboard support, and being the best device by far for Indie games.

If I had nothing and were to pick a format today it would be unanimously PC. But unless Sony have an Xbox like console crash I can see myself residing on PlayStation for the foreseeable.
Simundo

I’m a potato
After reading the Reader’s Feature, I hadn’t really thought about the issue of the Switch 2 inevitably leaking out. But now he mentions it, it does seem obvious that we’ll get some kind of potato cam photo of it long before there’s an unofficial reveal, if they’re waiting till next year.

So, yeah, count me in the ‘it could be tomorrow’ crowd. Even if it’s not, like he says, it’s good to be excited about something in gaming again. Especially as a new console means new first party Nintendo games and we’ve currently got no idea what any of them could be.
Sondi

Everyone was Zelda
Got Zelda on Thursday and it’s awesome. I had started replaying the previous Zelda games (Four Swords was particularly great and I still reckon The Wind Waker was underrated).

But they are now on hold.

Echoes is quite simply a nice and lovely game to play.

The absolute core of the game is Zelda mechanics, but you get a new ability instead of a new item/weapon (with way more echoes than you got new items).

It is going to take ages to play through, as my kids and wife have also started playing. For an interesting thing, we have gone entirely different ways after the start (e.g. after the first dot, I went right and my wife went left, both kids went slightly different ways, so found new and different stuff).

We are totally watching each other play, as everything will be something that needs doing by everyone at some point.

Probably take forever to finish, but it is a really good shared experience.

It has shown two things: most bits in the game definitely have multiple ways to solve (different echoes/solutions, different ways to beat baddies and bosses), which is really inventive.

Games produced by women must resonate with women. From the four people in the house, I am the only man, and everyone has played it more than me!

It also really feels like it came from the pieces of a ‘Zelda Maker’ game (think this was rumoured). And if it wasn’t, then it should be.
Si Zero