Nintendo recently announced the Switch. They made the announcement in a preview trailer that can be found here. The Console is set to launch in March of next year. Nintendo also announced a presentation for the Switch on January 12.
Time for a Switch
The Nintendo Switch is a tablet with detachable controllers that can dock with your TV, playing it’s games anywhere. It combines home and portable in single unit. You can play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on your big-screen TV at home, but why stop there? Pull the Switch out of the docking station next to your TV, and you can take that game on the go. But the teaser trailer does leave some questions unanswered. Is the screen on the Switch a touch screen? We assume it must be, but we didn’t see anyone touching it. Do the Joy-Cons have motion sensors? I give that about a 50 percent chance, but again, we didn’t see it. Can you use the Joy-Cons to point and click at the TV screen, like a Wii remote? Not sure!
What we know so far
Before the announcement, the only game we knew that was coming to the Switch was The legend of Zelda: Breath of the wild. But the preview showed us a new 3d Mario game and Skyrim remastered. It also showed what looks to be a new Splatoon game and a Mario Kart 8 port.While at E3, Ubisoft announced that Just Dance will also be coming to the system. While you will surely be able to buy games digitally on the Switch, physical game retailers aren’t being left out. You’ll be able to buy your games on tiny cards about the size of a 3DS game cart, if you’re into that sort of thing. No promise that every game will get such a physical release, of course. And no details on how big those cards are.
As usual with a new platform, Nintendo has a massive list of major game developers and publishers that are announcing support for the system. This does not defiantly mean that they will release games for the system, just that they are looking into it. The list contains Capcom, Sega and Bethesda and much more.
The Switch is powered by a version of Nvidia’s Tegra mobile processor. Although Nintendo usually doesn’t like talking about what’s inside the hardware, that changes with Nintendo Switch, as it’s publicly touting the fact that inside the unit is an Nvidia Tegra, the high-performance mobile gaming chip.
“The high-efficiency scalable processor includes an Nvidia GPU based on the same architecture as the world’s top-performing GeForce gaming graphics cards,” Nvidia wrote on its blog. But the company isn’t just providing the chips, it says, noting that it was involved in the creation of the “algorithms, computer architecture, system design, system software, APIs, game engines and peripherals.”
Where did it go wrong?
The Nintendo Switch is looking to be a good console right now but now we talk about the Wii u. The Wii U was the first Nintendo console to support HD graphics. The systems primary controller is the Wii u gamepad, which features an embedded touch screen and combines directional buttons, analog sticks and action buttons. The screen can be used either as a supplement to the main display or in supported games, to play the game directly on the gamepad instead of the TV. The Wii U is also backward compatible with all Wii games and includes games from the NES-to Wii through Virtual console through the Wii u eshop. Put all that together and it can be hard to see why the Wii u is considered a failure.
The gamepad got criticized for having short battery. The battery only last for 3-5 hours and with a high capacity battery will only last 8 hours. The Wii U also had a weak lineup of launch titles. The Wii U was met with slow consumer adoption, with low sales primarily credited to a weak lineup of launch titles and third party games and the marketing was just not good enough to be able to sell a system.
Although the Wii U does not have any 3rd party support, it does have some of the best 1st party games Nintendo has to offer. In 2014 (2 years after the Wii u launched) the system got Mario Kart 8, Hyrule Warriors, Super Smash Bros and Bayonetta 2. The year after, the system got Super Mario maker, Xenoblade Chronicles X and Splatoon, and with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild releasing next year, it hard to forget about the Wii u.
Nintendo recently announced that production for the Wii u is scheduled to be ending soon. This news should come as no surprise since it has sold less then 14 million units worldwide despite a series of strong and original games from Nintendo. It’s the company’s worst selling console, just behide the 21 million selling Gamecube.
Following the unveiling of the Switch, a Nintendo spokesperson confirmed that the company would slow production of Wii U hardware, stating that “as we prepare for the launch of Nintendo Switch in March of 2017. As long as the Nintendo Switch has a strong lineup of launch titles and better marketing, maybe it can succeed where the Wii U failed.