Mystery Science News Thread 3,000

as the premium market died, so did the tablet game market

seriously, no one could believe that in a market of 1 billion users we couldn’t get a market for premium games bigger than a Wii U

but here we are

i could believe it because the maintainers of the storefronts absolutely could not care less.

rather, they might actually actively dislike premium products.

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I guess after two entire generations of the Wii/DS and WiiU/3DS being specialized boutique systems that you have to allocate special resources to…more of the same except the console and handheld are one system is…fine to me? I guess if I owned stock in Nintendo I’d maybe care about what would happen in like six years but uh…

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I think it’s a force out of their control, or too strong for the control they’re willing to put on it. You can see them trying to course-correct with lists like “editor’s choice” leaning towards premium games, giving prime real estate towards the types of things we’d be interested in. But the Deep Structure is against them.

yeah I mean to be clear I still think they’re making the right call here, trying to consolidate the audiences that still mostly make sense and using the best off the shelf hardware platform to do so, the numbers just aren’t quite as close to plausible as I’d like

but it shouldn’t be surprising, really. it’s been proven a few times in the past couple years that while CPUs can still be remarkably powerful in tiny thermal envelopes, GPUs (for the most part) can’t (because they’re computationally way more “powerful” than CPUs at this point), so you start to chafe at when you can realistically put in a handheld.

i, for one, look forward to an etrian odyssey i can sit down to play on a big screen

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the problem is there really isn’t much overlap in who pays for what, and having random editor’s choice type things isn’t, like, a storefront dedicated to the sort of person who would want to buy premium content whole

the discovery problem is real

there is a reason that the dominant mobile structure is ‘we’ll make a game that’s generally kind of fun to play on a core level and then we’ll make all our money on people who don’t really want to play it and make people want to kill themselves on the horrible grind if they try to go without.’ it’s made fun of, but it’s not the same people who are buying whole games. the ones who would are trying to see how far they can go without buying anything!

One of the best things I liked about the GameCube was putting a Gamboy Player on it and playing all my GB Advance games on my tv.

The Switch is going to be so awesome in that kind of regard. Like, I don’t think it’ll let you play your 3ds games on your tv anything but all those games that would have been on the 3ds will now be on the switch.

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……… idk, when comparing the switch to powerful android-/generally high-end smart-phones right now, how good would these specs fare?


I like the point brought up by @VastleCania here, we naturally assume that Nintendo will position the Switch against the PS4Pro/XB1++, but looking at these specs, I’m starting to wonder - do they?

If they went for the smartphone (and non-existent tablet-)market, it looks like they’d home closely for the bracket between the Snapdragon 821 and 835 atm … without GHz-info, only thing I see that the Tegra is missing is LPDDR4X support (and 10 minutes ago I didn’t even know what that was), so I guess that’s not too much of a game changer (literally) either.


When I think about it for a moment - where are the kids at these days, playing them pokemans on smartphones, right? All while we elderly gamers™ throw 60 bucks per release and 300+$ at incremental updates like the PS4Pro … … from _that_ point of view, I am thinking, OK, this might even partially make sense, in a way?






needless to say, writing this post from a Phenom II X4 965 BE, I am kinda the wrong person to hype up this approach of low power, “put fun back in the game” approach that Big-N might seek here, and will remain in my gated community of the 1980’ies computing arms race that aims for the Next Big Thing in tech nerd porno, just sayin’ ~~~

Okay, yes, it’s slow and stuff and probably won’t be super powerful

will it have games I want

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Yeah there it is!

yeah I mean CPU-wise most high-end phones are pretty competitive with PS4/Xbone at this point because those have AMD chips in them which are not super great, and ARM chips have continued to post 90s-style IPC gains from generation to generation lately. that’s part of why the WiiU CPU was such a disaster, it was substantially slower than an iPhone 5S that came out a year later.

the switch isn’t gonna be that weak either way – it’ll be the first handheld with sticks and buttons that’s significantly faster than last-gen consoles / the vita – it’s just a matter of, “does its GPU wind up looking like a sensible target for console devs”

Only a few, probably.

The little bit of that new Mario from the trailer gave me Sunshine vibes. And those are good, good vibes.

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honestly, even if it’s just straight ports of Mario Kart 8 & Splatoon, i’d still pick it up

the potential of having two people having Switches, and still being able to play 4 player Smash wherever you want, that’s appealing (controller situation aside)

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Is Smash3DS not good?

I mean, I bought an Xbone to play Sunset Overdrive, a value proposition that’s been losing value more and more with every desperate attempt by MS to recapture the hearts and minds of PC gamers by locking them into an ecosystem, so, yeah, a few would probably be enough

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Have they announced a price yet

Is a power adapter included in the box this time

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I don’t think they’ve said anything about pricing but my guess would be $250-300. Just a number pulled out of my ass. Would be surprised if it was significantly more or less.

A separate storefront with a different (non-uninstallable) app launcher? I don’t know, because then as a developer you’re again choosing to jump out of the ‘real’ market. Like, where does that inflection point live? because you can filter for premium or look at premium sales charts or look at a curated list.

I don’t think they’re doing it right but at the same time it’s a hard problem and I don’t know the answer. I think Steam does best at this and even then it’s an agonizing burning mess; the ‘do-overs’ like itch are nice but largely nice because they’re small and meaningless; were itch to become popular it’d lose its virtues.