Man does not live only from AC
Nintendo has lived in a bubble for years thanks to the comeback it had with the Switch. Wii U was a monumental disaster whose story gives for another whole article, but the big problems it had since its launch (marketing, lack of target audience and launch games) were corrected in its successor, being one of the best-selling consoles until the date. It has also benefited from other indirect causes, such as the launch of Animal Crossing: New Horizons just as we were shutting ourselves up in our homes, and what seemed at first like it was going to be another monumental fiasco has brought Nintendo back to the surface. However, every time Nintendo stops being that toymaker to become almost the Apple of the industry, because if there is something money has, it is that, the more quantity, the more desire.
The condescension of Nintendo with which it seems to say “anything goes” can be expensive, and to show the launch of Xbox One, completely focused on the most casual thanks to the success of Kinect and with quite aggressive anti-consumer policies. Nintendo is that company that can afford to offer you a subscription to its online connection having the worst infrastructure, having glaring design flaws and launching more than mediocre products thinking that we are going to go through the hoop, and to a certain extent it is working for them . Metroid Dread it was a firecracker taking into account the figures that the saga usually moves, and Animal Crossing keep on sweeping. However, the speech seems to have changed a bit compared to what Ignacio was saying a few days ago, and that is that people are getting tired. They may not have recognized it directly, but they are aware of how this works.
Separate comments on sales and the lack of semiconductors, Doug Bowser explained to The Verge who know that they have a problem with the joysticks of the Joy-Con and with the emulation of their old Nintendo 64 games. The first is a problem that began to worsen in 2019, costing them a lawsuit and that, to appease the enraged crowd, offered to repair the controls for free (although only in some parts of the world). Bowser said that there have been various revisions of the joysticks, and it is true that there are different models of that particular piece although the result is always the same. Maybe they all started breaking at the same time was not a good sign., and that successive models of the console such as the Lite also suffered close to 20 hours of play is very serious. The OLED switch came out this past month and they haven’t wanted to comment on drifting until now, ensuring this model has the latest revision installed. The most surprising thing about all this is that it is precisely Nintendo, a veteran of the industry, that has a problem of this caliber with a technology that has been with us for almost 30 years and that other laptops have managed to carry much better.
The other point of contention is the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack, which collects some emulated Nintendo 64 titles but not as one would expect. The online multiplayer connection is lousy, some games suffer from terrible control lag and then it’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. What is one of the most important games in history suffers not only from lag, but from a bad load on the textures that make the game look terrible. We are aware that Nintendo in recent years has tried to survive with its old glories, hardly offering new concepts and completely ignoring its community. I mean, Super Mario 3D All-Stars had no GameCube controller support even though one of his games came out on that console. Skyward Sword HD It came out more expensive and just as ugly than the original. It is the minimum of the minimum, and the limit is being reached. What could have been an alternative to emulation has become another stab for those who believed that Nintendo continues to take care of its sagas and to reach pure and simple excellence. Switch has the only advantage over a mobile that can move more powerful games and than its titles first-party they don’t come out of there, and I’m really sorry, but Steam Deck isn’t going to catch up with it. It will be more powerful, but the higher price and the low battery (apart from the fact that even your grandmother knows that Nintendo = video game and Steam = possible brand of washing machine) are very important factors, as has been seen many times before. We talked about the game in the cloud another day.
It is not the first time that it is said and it will not be the last, but this will end up exploding on one side or the other. Right now a Switch is valuable for its convenience being portable and thanks to the indies and incredible ports from larger studios. When it was joked that “all indies come out on Switch” it was still a sad reality, and it is that if it weren’t because you can play Celeste in the subway it would be another PSVita. There are those who are profitable and hey, to the full with it, but this anti-consumer trend is becoming more dangerous, and the moment any model can be hacked in any version we will see who is the one who pays 50 bucks to play F-Zero. It’s a hot potato that when it explodes, they won’t be able to say they didn’t see it coming.
–
