There was also 3DFX that led the way, before NVIDIA, with their Voodoo cards. The night and day difference of gaming on a Trident card vs a Voodoo card made grown men cry.
The Switch 1 sold about 150m units, the Steam Deck’s sold 6m.
Internet nerds like us aren’t really Nintendo’s target market, I don’t think. Installing emulators or jailbreaking a system isn’t something most of their customer base would have the want or need to do, IMO.
Even some of us internet nerds are Nintendo fans who wouldn't go anywhere near emulating. Apart from any of the moral concerns, it's just such a worse experience: I want to use a touch screen, a portable device, a proper gamepad, etc. Nintendo has built up quite a considerable amount of goodwill since the 1980s, and the reward for that is a pretty loyal customer base.
I love Nintendo and have since the NES was released. Taking a day or 2 to set up an Ayn Thor w/ every game I've ever played from my childhood, the instruction manuals, and whatever other conveniences modern emulation affords really does beat trying to find the old hardware and games at a ridiculous premium. Also buying most all of the old stuff doesn't help Nintendo in any way so the 'morality' goes out the window. The setup IS a bit tedious but once it's done you rarely have to change anything.
I also own a Switch 1 w/ Breath of The Wild but I prefer to emulate it because you can increase the draw distance, get 60 FPS, add some HD textures [1], and fix some other issues that I had with the game because the Switch 1 was such terrible hardware. Even the Switch 2 version isn't nearly as good as the one you can get from emulating.
Opposite for me. I pirated and emulated some switch games that I wouldn't have played on an actual device because I don't like handhelds and I hate playing games at 30 FPS and in low resolution. Any polish and intended experience goes out of the window when I'm constantly distracted by terrible framerate.
Personally I won’t bother playing any game or console that can’t be emulated these days.
The whole experience just feels so enshitifies from the days when I could just put in a cartridge and boot into a fame in seconds with no internet, updates to manage, accounts to worry about, etc.
Has everyone forgotten the PSP already? When I was at school a lot of kids in my class(including myself) had one, and I don't recall anyone getting any actual games for it, I do remember the clerk at the store explaining to my parents that oh this console is very easy to hack and you can just download games online for it, which is exactly what everyone I knew did.
Which seems to be what everyone did everywhere, as the console sold very very well and the software for it sold poorly.
This is actually the Japanese experience too. Many Japanese ex-kids of PSP generation have the story of the guy from two classes over with a Pandora battery and the firmware stick usually in his school bag. But sound of UMD drives seeking was common too, and discs themselves aren't rare at all, so I think a lot of games did sell in the end?
Where'd you go to school? Bay Area? Those sound like smart kids.
For what it's worth, I also had a cracked PSP. I did the battery pack hack, it was gory and awesome. I'm guessing some of the later iterations got a little simpler? All software?
I wonder what % of kids today are using a modded Switch or rooted Android.
Once you had a modified battery, it was pretty easy to do more PSPs. I was able to purchase the battery later and just carry around the software on a memory card. Sold that as a service for a bit.
So true. It's dangerous to form world views based on "What HN thinks". This is the best community on the Internet IMHO but we're a very tiny slice of the population. "Real people" tend to not behave like us.
I remember as a child many of my friends getting a PS1 specifically because you could chip it and burn games.
Young people love piracy because they have no money to pay
I was one of them. Now I got a good salary I use it to actually buy games. So in a way piracy led me to keep up my game enjoyment into adulthood. Doesn’t make it legal of course but with a delayed effect the games industry is getting their money from me.
More likely to happen via recompilation, if anything. Game ports via recompilation have been taking off in the last month or so, all the way up to systems as recent as the PS5 and Switch 1. It has far less overhead than emulation.
Totally, convenience always wins. I think this is more of a hardware sales issue for Nintendo though — if what I understand is true, I'd bet that we see Switch 2 games running on other systems before we see a CFW/decrypt-encrypt stack for running pirated games on the Switch 2 itself.
According to wikipedia, they sold over 23 million units of the switch 2 and over 155 million of the switch. Not that I agree with their aggressive practices but it clearly works. That's a lot more than the Steam Deck btw.
have you ever played first party titles on the switch?
the level of polish and stability on the open world zeldas is astonishing, i never experienced anything like that in third party AA/AAA games form the last 15 years or so, playing on the switch or on the pc.
Out of curiosity, have you played God of War (2018) or God of War: Ragnarok (2022)[1]? I find the level of polish/stability of those games to be utterly incredible (almost to the point of ruining many other games for me), but I avoid Nintendo out of principle so I have no basis of comparison. Would love to hear from someone who has experienced both how they compare.
[1]: Given those were originally Playstation exclusives, it might not be the best example/comparison, but they have been available on Steam for quite some time
>Would love to hear from someone who has experienced both how they compare.
I have. In terms of a bug-free experience, nintendo games and the main cinematic sony games (including also last of us 2 and the like) feel equally good.
The surprising thing about open world zeldas is that they allow a lot of physics tinkering. Keeping a story based, relatively on rails game stable is far easier than an open world sandbox. TotK feels like it should be a skyrim-like bug ridden experience but it isn't.
Also nintendo games tend to feel very satisfying, call it good UX if that makes sense. Animations, sounds, they do really know how to produce a sense of wonder.
That said I hate the hardware, I own a switch and yet I play on a steamdeck. The screen's not that good, controls are awkward, the sticks start drifting as soon as you blink...
I’ve played both - I beat God of War 2018 but quit Ragnarok after a couple hours because you’d hit a puzzle and Atreus wouldn’t shut up with hints.
But yes, Nintendo’s polish is definitely on that level, even their weird little Japanese games like Tomadochi Life have an incredibly coherent theme and polish within themselves despite some being incredibly whimsical and goofy. I think part of it is what you get when you have the same devs working for 40 years on say, Mario games. Truly masters of their craft. Super Smash Brothers is a supreme work of social engineering how they managed to convince so many disparate companies and even competitors to allow their IP in the game and everything just fits together so well.
I would buy a Switch if it were an open, hackable platform that I owned. If Nintendo put all of its games in stores on open platforms DRM-free, I buy and would own nearly every Nintendo title ever released.
Alas. Having a pleasant and moral game-playing experience falls on our and the community's shoulders.
I have no desire to buy Nintendo's hardware as I don't want to play their games badly enough to buy a dedicated console and deal with their practices. I have however enjoyed the last two Zelda titles on my PC where I was able to play them with performance and quality mods. Once it was just another application the barrier of entry was low enough to get my interest. If the games were available as actual PC titles I would have gladly paid for them
You can pay for them if you appreciate the effort that went into making the game. Nothing to stop you buying the Switch cart and playing an emulated version.
Same. I let the LLM work inside a framework that I made.
Of course I only arrived at the framework after trial and error with an LLM showed me the shape of the problem and the framework presented itself to me.
Had this thought this morning after seeing DHH announcing that Basecamp isn't writing code by hand anymore and they're using AI to write Rust for Hey's backend.
To me they're failing to see the even bigger picture that maybe even Hey itself is outdated in the Ai era and not only is its Ruby framework antiquated... the whole Hey service is too.
Lately on my hobby projects I've been lazily committing work with the prompt 'add the relevant files to git and commit with a message that explains why' - only because I remember 15 years ago reading an HN comment from someone complaining that too many commit messages answer 'what' but not 'why' haha
So far I haven't had a reason to go back through commits to isolate any issues but if I do hoping the 'why' messages may come in handy for my LLM lol
It’s really hard to believe that all the benefit of the sun can be achieved in a single pill.
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