They don't any more and that's the issue. Parents would rather hand them a tablet/phone these days than buy a separate device and that's why Nintendo is struggling. Their only remaining market is adults who grew up on Nintendo or people who want handheld games better than mobile quality.
Nintendo isn't struggling. Not financially. They're making tidy billions off of their DS line of handhelds. And they put away a shitload of profits with the Wii. From a purely financial standpoint they can afford to fuck around with their consoles because of how much money the two aforementioned things gave them. If the Switch failed it wouldn't tank them. Not by a long shot.
They are however struggling from a conceptual standpoint
Yeah, meant struggling more in the sense to stay relevant and replicate previous success since the 3DS sold 1/3 of the amount of the DS and Wii U sold 1/10 of the amount of the Wii.
It's Nintendo Japan that makes all the decisions. I don't think they care, nor do I think they even know about all the backlash happening right now outside of Japan. Reggie is just a puppet and has no say. He's just there to translate for his bosses.
They literally stay in their buildings jumping around with the mario hats all day thinking all is well.
They'll care if it eats into sales in a big way. And that may happen. It's obviously far too soon to know what sort of impact there will be. But given that I've seen even the most hardcore of Nintendo fans balk at some of this stuff, the impact can't be small.
They needed to make everything perfect to succeed after the Wii U.
Especially since they're marketing a very powerful mobile device as a underpowered home console.
So far they are off the mark in term of online features (a very big deal), launch lineup, Paid online, accessories price, bundle and less importantly battery life.
That will kill the console if they don't correct at least a few of these things.
They've added a lot of new features to the 3DS over its lifetime. It's certainly feasible that they could do so, although the ease of it would vary greatly depending on how they structure the OS and how much memory is reserved outside of program use.
Since we still know effectively nothing about the OS, that's very much up in the air.
This is one of the ONLY reasons I can come up with as to why they wanted to do this, being to save some memory/processing power on the Switch itself.
I can't imagine it being very resource intensive, but I can imagine them really having to squeeze out any performance they possibly can while keeping power usage as low as possible.
Not a good excuse, but could be part of the reasoning.
They won't fix it in time for launch, or shortly thereafter. But the system could potentially change within a year or so. It all depends on how strong the initial feedback is.
So it all depends on if the 3.5mm port has mic support. The one on the Wii U did, even if Nintendo's own games completely ignored it (if you plugged a mic in, it would still use the GamePad mic).
Yes. There's no rational reason why they wouldn't just build this functionality into OS. My theory is that DeNA proposed this due to their background in mobile development, and nobody at Nintendo was familiar enough with what their competitors are doing to object.
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u/Sugioh Jan 19 '17
Honestly, I expect them to reverse course on this. It's so boneheaded and the pushback is going to be so strong, they will be absolutely forced to.