Been thinking about some of the mistakes Nintendo have made with the Switch 2 so far, and it’s not great.
They definitely have comms, common sense and design issues with this system.
There’s plenty to scratch your head about with Switch 2, but the thing that baffles
me the most is the thinking around storage.
Why have Nintendo gone for expensive non-proprietary storage?
If you want to jack up the storage cost, make it proprietary like the Vita or Xbox (I’m obviously not saying this is a good idea). I don’t see the sense in making their users buy expensive SD cards that £ per GB and £ per read/write are shit.
If I were looking at Switch 2 and thinking how I’d do this, I’d:
- use user-replaceable NVMe instead of soldered storage and SD (they are literally cheaper)
- use slower/cheaper game cards that users need to install games to storage from rather than putting fast storage in every card printed
- avoid the use of this stupid game key card stuff by giving publishers cheap storage to ship the games on
I find their approach incredibly baffling. And that’s just the storage side of things. There’s a whole bunch of other things that feel like they have botched comms and design on, like:
- this weird 15fps camera
- a button that requires a subscription, and feels functionally useless even if you have one
- exorbitantly priced games
- Switch 2 edition ambiguity on physical (later resolved, after an answer was dragged out of Nintendo)
- this whole VRR thing
- things I can’t even think of right now
I have one on pre-order - heck, I had a Wii U on pre-order - but it’s hard to feel optimistic about this system.
About the only thing they haven’t fucked up on is I have no doubt in my mind that the less informed users know what it is versus the original. My concern is they’ll look at it and say they don’t want it.