We lost the war the moment PC gamers started treating upscaling as a feature instead of a compromise. As anyone paying attention could have predicted, developers didn’t embrace upscaling to push their craft further. They embraced it because it gave them an easy way out. And what’s almost laughable is how transparent the whole thing was. Upscaling was pitched primarily as a solution to the massive performance hit caused by ray tracing, another technology that, while visually impressive, exists...
Price of the console stayed the same. Price of the acessories have climbed 12% on average. Likely due to the general 10% tarrifs that the US govern impossed.
Nintendo Switch 2 Carry Case & Screen Protector: $34 to $40
Joy-Con 2 Strap: $13 to $14
Camera: $50 to $55
Nintendo Switch 2 Dock Set: $110 to $120
Joy-Con 2 Wheel (set of two): $20 to $25
Nintendo Switch 2 AC Adapter: $29 to $35
Joy-Con 2 controllers: $90 to $...
I'm pretty confident this game didn’t sell all that well, and it sure didn’t move the needle on Game Pass subscriptions. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great game, but the PC requirements are pretty high and the IP isn’t exactly popular these days.
Maybe a PS5 or Switch 2 release will give it a second shot at relevance, but honestly, I wouldn’t bet lunch money on a sequel.
We're going to have to wait and see. Currently, there's no technology that would allow a Steam Deck 2 to achieve a performance leap over the Steam Deck 1 similar to what the Switch 2 offers over the Switch 1, without sacrificing the device's portability.
We'll either need AMD to seriously improve the efficiency of their cores, so we can get something with the rasterization power of a Radeon 8060S but without the power consumption of an Xbox Series S, or Valv...
Well, it worked.
This nothingburger of a opinion article got a lot of views and comments.
BotW is going to be $70 (base game) + $20 (DLC) + $10 (Upgrade).
TotK is going to be $80 (base game) + $10 (Upgrade).
So both will be $90 for full experience.
Yes, that's the core of the issue.
Nintendo is free to set whatever price they choose. These are non-essential products, so there's no clear moral dimension to the pricing itself, it's simply a business decision.
However, there's the other side of the transaction to consider. Consumers ultimately hold the power. They express their approval or disapproval not through words, but through their wallets. My hope is that, this time, people will ...
Well, fortunately, Nintendo has implemented cloud saves for all Switch users, completely disconnected from any sort of subscription. Right?
The issue is finding people with the courage to even attempt that. Nintendo went hard on emulators this time around, even tracking people outside their usual sphere of influence. As for better PC emulation for the Switch 1, that’s not coming from this. Nintendo has famously never released an in-house emulator that outperforms a community-made one.
Oh yeah, the gameplay that matches so well with the narrative it gives you whiplash if you're paying attention. I swear TLOU 2 was developed by two different teams that had only minimal interaction with each other.
Nintendo is a fascinating company. Even when things are clearly not going well for them, they continue to make choices that don't really benefit the consumer. And yet, their fans stick with them, almost unshaken. The Wii U era is one of the clearest examples of this. The console struggled on every level, from sales to third-party support, but Nintendo made very little effort to win back trust or offer real value to their customers.
They charged players to "upgrade&...
Well, it depends on the definition of "mobile." Technically, the most recent AMD APU with that focus is the Halo Strix or the Ryzen AI MAX. And those things smoke the Steam Deck performance-wise. The AI MAX 390 is in the same ballpark as the AMD RX 7600 GPU, whereas the top-of-the-line AI MAX 395 actually sits between the RX 7600 and the RX 7700. That means the weaker version is a bit below the base PS5 in terms of power, while the more expensive model is slightly above it.
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A lot of gamers don’t realize that ray tracing isn’t really about making games look better. It’s mainly there to make development easier and cheaper, since it lets devs skip a bunch of old-school tricks to fake reflections and lighting. The visual upgrade is just a nice bonus, but that’s not the main reason the tech exists.
So you can be 100% sure that developers will try to implement it every chance they get.
Oh, totally. Just like they said that the 5070 is equivalent to a 4090. This is just Nvidia PR talk. I wouldn't take this comment as having any real-world accuracy.
From what we saw from multiplat games like Cyberpunk 2077, the Switch 2 appears to be around 20% of the Steam Deck. And I don't think anyone would argue that the Steam Deck is 10x more powerful than the Switch 1.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I still think it can be a pretty bad value. But unlike the Pro, the lack of value isn’t going to come from the hardware or a lack thereof. It’s the game prices that could end up being way too high, with Nintendo opening the floodgates.
But that’s something we will have to wait and see.
To put things into perspective, the Steam Deck’s preset for Cyberpunk 2077 runs at a mix of medium and low settings, targets 40 FPS, and renders at 650p before upscaling. That means the Switch 2 version will likely be very close to what you get on the Deck in handheld mode, possibly a bit sharper.
When it comes to efficiency, the Steam Deck lasts between 1 hour 40 minutes and 2 hours 15 minutes while running Cyberpunk. Based on Nintendo’s own worst-case scenario, the Switch...
I don’t disagree that the Steam Deck has room for improvement, but I think it’s a bit too soon for people to treat the Switch 2 as the new standard. A lot of its rumored features might not even be widely used. The fact that Cyberpunk 2077 is targeting 720p at 30 or 40 FPS, depending on the mode, makes it pretty clear that while a nice screen is great, it only really matters if the hardware can keep up. We’ve already seen this with pricier Windows handhelds, where better displays don’t always ...
I think they only did for the 3DS when it failed. But if the Switch 2's sales go well, they will definitely ask $550 for the OLED. They might even be nice and add a slightly larger battery to it as well as a bonus.
I live in a city that has an Xbox Cloud server, and my local network uses Wi-Fi 6. I've used the service for quite a while. I can't really say I don't feel the latency. Some titles are completely unplayable for me, like Forza Horizon 5. But there are also many games where I barely notice it, such as A Crab's Treasure and Halo MCC.
Honestly, it's great that they're working on making it better. But the way it works right now is already pretty usable, a...