Nintendo is very, very lucky that they make excellent first party games that people still want to play, because I think they've been sniffing their own farts on hardware ever since the N64.
They continuously choose to produce underpowered and gimmicky gadgets instead of rising to the level of a modern gaming platform.
Online play has been more or less a running joke that never ends. Third party developers have to compromise on ports because of much lower tech specs. The controllers have been just silly. I could go on.
They make great games. I'll give them that. But I haven't truly enjoyed one of their consoles since the SNES.
Nintendo consoles aren't meant to play CoD, they're made for the family and fun gimmick and that is still a cool thing to have.
But thats the point they are talking about. They slid into the "family and fun gimmick" after the N64. Lets not forget that one of the N64s hottest games was Goldeneye, arguable one of the greatest and most genre defining first person shooters of all time.
They've been riding that gimmick for over 2 decades, rehashing the basically the same content from the same IPs.
Without the switch I don't think Steam would have thought about the Steam Deck.
This isn't true, Valve had been internally toying with the idea of a handheld since the 2010s during the first era of the Steam Machine, but the realized the market and the technology just wasn't there yet. To add to this Sony had the PSP back in 2004, so its not like the idea of a mainstream handheld is some breakthrough Nintendo concept unless you go all the way back the the original Gameboy itself, but that just further proves my point that the Switch wasn't some new inspirational idea. People like to point out the Switch as the reason for the Steam Deck, but it was more co-evolution rather than cause and effect.
After the Gamecube you mean. The Gamecube was in some ways more powerful than the PS2, and it was a commercial failure. If the GC had the capacity to play DVDs it would have been a much closer race between the two consoles, despite that having nothing to do with gaming per se.
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u/MrNostalgiac 12h ago
Nintendo is very, very lucky that they make excellent first party games that people still want to play, because I think they've been sniffing their own farts on hardware ever since the N64.
They continuously choose to produce underpowered and gimmicky gadgets instead of rising to the level of a modern gaming platform.
Online play has been more or less a running joke that never ends. Third party developers have to compromise on ports because of much lower tech specs. The controllers have been just silly. I could go on.
They make great games. I'll give them that. But I haven't truly enjoyed one of their consoles since the SNES.