Its almost like those “politics” are related to why the pricing is weird?
But hey, fuck em. This is hype train time, right? We should be thankful it is only eighty bucks for Mario Kart because REAL fans would give them a hundred bucks for the greatest game ever made or whatever asinine bullshit.
You DO realize that a port is not just as simple as picking the dropdown in your editor to compile for switch versus xbox versus PC, right?
There is a substantial amount of effort to do any kind of port. And for one where the default experience is a 1080p handheld display? The kinds of games that only have M+KB support (because people are also forgetting the “KB” part…) are not the ones that run the best on tiny screens. And where the default use case is having both joycons still connected to the device.
Don’t get me wrong. There are definitely corner cases. But we literally went through this with the Steam Controller a decade or so ago (15 years?). Consoles are a giant part of the market and targeting xinput gets you an interface that works on all of those AND improves the experience for a lot of users on PC. Versus finding a way to downscale your input to just a mouse and 8-10 buttons?
The number of third parties that meaningfully benefit from the switch-mouse are going to be very small. And most, if not all, of them will also have gamepad support for people who don’t want to have to sit at at a table with a surface that is compatible with said switch mouse.
OH! If studios were really going to specifically target switch ports for RTSes and Grand Strategy games, we would have seen a lot more that took advantage of the motion controls of the Switch 1. That shit was wild.
Eh?
Conceptually I like the idea.
But even if it isn’t uncomfortable to use and has decent DPI? It is going to have the same problem the OG steam controller or even the PS5 adaptive triggers have. If only one platform is going to use an input type then it is not going to be used by any third parties.
Yes, in this case it is two platforms: Switch and PC. But the number of developers who will say “I can make a switch port and only a switch port of my game” are few and far between. They’ll once again focus on how to make gamepad work because that gives them ALL the consoles, the Steam Deck, and even helps us olds with RSI.
It isn’t quite that easy.
The US is a MASSIVE part of basically every luxury industry and isn’t insignificant in many others. So while alternate trading partners can be found to handle stuff like lumber, plenty of industries are going to be hit real hard and not have alternative customers. And they aren’t going to just want to lower their profits for national pride.
But yeah. I REALLY hope trump is just actively destroying the US either in the name of putin or just out of anger and spite over not winning in 2020. Because the alternative is that we are all going to suffer so fucking much because that piece of shit doesn’t understand what tariffs are.
I assume it will be on basically every subscription IGC.
Big lump sum to start with and guarantee they have a successful launch for any investors. And then people will buy it when it leaves the IGC in 6-12 months because they put it off or were waiting for a DLC or whatever. And then they’ll buy it on every single platform because Hollow Knight is that damned good.
But the actual price to get something in an IGC is not as high as people think it is.
Its hard to tell what exactly their MS deal is and it would be surprising if MS had much influence beyond “We are part of the first release date”
But 2025 is actually pretty plausible. Pure speculation, but if Silksong was in the polishing/padding stage in even late 2023 and Team Cherry are financially stable? Waiting for a new console release makes a lot of sense. ESPECIALLY the Switch 2 since…
Look. The Switch 1’s launch year was a fucking shitshow. Yeah yeah yeah, they had the greatest wii u of all time and blah blahblah. But the first party releases were pretty jacked up. It was “the Nindies” that carried the Switch 1. And it was ridiculously good for those indie studios who basically were the only games available for the latest Nintendo gameboy.
And Switch 2 is looking the same. That sizzle reel was almost all “We have a small DLC for the Switch 1 game!” and “This will be available in 2026”. So you can bet plenty of indie devs and publishers were in talks with Nintendo about when the release window was so they could decide if they wanted to wait or not.
… The entire hour long show IS an ad.
The modern world needs to change. Humans are getting more and more depressed, broken, struggling and mentally ill just to get more and more exposed to ads, social pressure and the lot.
This is by design. People are rightfully criticizing the US for barely protesting our fascist regime. But everyone is either living paycheck to paycheck or well aware how quickly their savings will burn away if they get fired. So protests in the middle of the week, when politicians MIGHT see it, are a no go. And weekend protests mostly are ineffectual and just antagonize people who “just want some peace and quiet on their day off”
UBI is definitely something we have needed for decades now. I personally come down on the side of UBI for basic living expenses but encourage people to work for luxuries and advancement (and if that sounds like the dystopia of Mars in The Expanse…). But we need something so that people can actually live without a job as we put more and more work into automating those jobs away.
As for the topic at hand: I was fortunate enough to have a 9/80 job for a number of years (basically every other Friday off) and loved the schedule. And it is why I am so skeptical of the 4/40 movement and am increasingly suspicious it is a poison pill.
Because it isn’t like the workload is going to drop. So people are going to be expected to get a full week’s work done in four days. For some that is going to be trivial because they have such a small workload (that they are super eager to find ways to use AI to automate…). For others? That means early mornings and late nights and even faster burnout where they have to fit every single errand and the like into that Friday off and have even less energy to do anything on the weekend.
Like I said, I loved my 9/80 and it was really nice for making me value that every other Friday off and try to do something with it. But the number of times I had to swap a Friday last minute because of meetings or just come in for a half day to get a deliverable done…
And the logical reality is that companies will decide 4/40 is good for productivity… and pay people 90% of their former salaries because “We respect the work you are doing but you also only work four days a week…”. 90% of already stagnating salaries during a time of global inflation.
Like basically all tech companies, the leadership are libertarian tech bros. It sucks, but whatever. The problem is also that the CEO (?) has been making public statements to try and cozy up to the trump administration over the past few months
Some of that still falls under the LTB effect (These policies benefit the company so fuck everyone else, etc) and it DOES make sense for a company to try and earn themselves an exception for the upcoming hellscape in a market that will REALLY want VPNs. But it still leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
Not in an “I MUST LEAVE PROTON NOW” state since I like the products because they tend to be pretty honest about what they will and won’t do when the goons come a knocking and that mostly boils down to “cooperate. So do X Y and Z to protect yourself by preventing us from having the information they want”). But that, plus protonmail being kind of a shitshow if you want to keep offline copies of your emails, is motivation to shop around.
The reason the switch 1 was emulated so fast was a hardware vulnerability on nvidia’s part. Presumably we won’t see that again.
Also: While switch games DO run better on a steam deck, they don’t run great. And I think estimates put the switch 2 at closer to a PS4 than PS3 in terms of power? But even PS3/360 games don’t run gerat on a Steam Deck.
Not to mention nintendo’s lawyers putting the fear of mario into the emulation community.
So in a few years? I could see MAYBE some proof of concepts. But I doubt we’ll actually be able to properly emulate switch 2 games until at least 2030.