The Fox And The Grapes

I want to make a good illustration of what I mean before I get into the point. So sit back and what this short clip.

As you saw in this story, the Fox was very hungry. He had been deprived of nourishment for a good while. He comes to the vineyard to see all these grapes that would most definitely feed his hunger. The problem is, even though he could see the grapes and even possibly smell the grapes, he could not REACH the grapes. He did everything in his power to reach the grapes but he could not avail.

After admitting defeat he basically tried to convince himself that he never wanted the grapes anyway, but we know better than that! That is where the term "Sour Grapes" comes from.

There are some people that when they cannot get what they want they act as though what they wanted wasn't important to start with. In gaming, you see a lot of people HOPING that Nintendo will do certain things, confident Nintendo will do certain things, BELIEVING Nintendo will do certain things and when those things don't happen.....................they act as though they never wanted or needed those things to happen in the first place.

The Nintendo Switch is doing well. Whether or not it continues to do well over the long-term remains to be seen. There are several key factors involved.

Novelty - Will the novelty of the Switch wear off at some point? Will it cease becoming the cool-new gadget to have sooner rather than later, or later rather than sooner?

3rd Party Support - Will Nintendo be able to find a way to get blanket 3rd-party support on the Switch? I have no doubt that they will get a smattering of 3rd-party games here and there just like the Wii U did. That isn't going to be enough I'm afraid.

Online/Voice Chat - Will Nintendo be able to deliver a intuitive online-infrastructure which covers all the bases including voice chat, Virtual Console, online multiplayer, and so-on?

Power - Will Nintendo be able to answer the bell when the already under-powered Nintendo Switch really looks dated next to the PS4 Pro, XBOX One X, and any other new hardware that may be announced?

Nintendo fans will be happy to hear that all Nintendo needs to do is control 3 out of the 4 things I mentioned to insure that the Switch is a success LONG-TERM, and I stress that because some people (and even Nintendo apparently) assume that the current sales of the Nintendo Switch will remain constant for at least the next 6-12 months if not longer. Well, you know what they say? When you assume things it makes an "ass" out of "you" and "me." It doesn't have to come to that though. Like I said, as long as Nintendo controls 3 out of the 4 things I mentioned they will be fine. This is how they can do it.

Publishing 3rd Party Games

Nintendo is going to have to face facts that if they want 3rd-party support they are going to have to pay for it. I'm not going to go into details explaining this again because I've done it enough times to where people who can or want to get it have, and people who can't or DON'T want to get it have not.

Suffice it to say that it is a proven-fact that 3rd-parties do not fare well financially on Nintendo consoles. If you are not Capcom, Square-Enix, or Ubisoft you have not had long-term financial success on Nintendo consoles. It makes no logical or financial sense for companies to invest money in ventures with no return. Even if the Switch continues to sell well, there is no guarantee that 3rd-party games will sell well, or even sell at all. If you own the Switch and something else, why would you choose to purchase an inferior-version of a game for the same price? No matter how good of a job the developer does in porting a multiplat to the Switch, it still will fall short (in terms of visuals) of even the base XBOX One. Unless all you own is the Switch, it would be foolish to buy an inferior-multiplat when you can buy a superior-version for the XB1, PS4, PS4 Pro, XBOX One X, or PC.

Even if you are a Nintendo fan, you are not under ANY obligation to purchase inferior products despite what anyone tells you. You don't need to go out and buy 3rd party games "just because" whenever they drop on the Switch in order to support Nintendo. That is completely absurd. You are the consumer and YOU have purchasing power. USE IT! You work hard for your money, and you deserve to spend it on quality products from everybody. If a 3rd-party does a fabulous job and offers something unique for the Switch version of a multiplat, by all means pick it up. If what they offer is trash, don't pick it up and get to the bottom of why it was trash. Don't just assume that the 3rd party purposely gimped the Switch version because they have some ulterior-motives. Don't dismiss that possibility, but don't assume that is the case either. NINTENDO needs to play an active role in making sure multiplats are of good quality on the Switch. More on that later.

Even though the Wii was a blockbuster and had what I would call decent 3rd-party support, if it wasn't a shovelware, motion-control, gimmick-laden game it didn't sell because that is what people owned a Nintendo Wii FOR. The motion-control experience.

So Nintendo is going to have to fork over publishing costs if they want 3rd-party games, and 3rd-party developers have already told Nintendo this and stated it publicly. You can't expect these developers to randomly toss money at the Nintendo-wall to see if it sticks. They DON'T HAVE IT. It's like taking your entire paycheck to play the PowerBall every week. Sure it MIGHT hit, but the odds of it not hitting are astronomical and you are wasting money you can't afford to waste in the meantime.

If Nintendo pays, 3rd party games come. Simple as that. So if you want 3rd party games on the Switch, you need to tell Nintendo to crack open that 10 billion-dollar piggy-bank and pony-up. Don't think this is reasonable? Ask Sony about the original Sony PlayStation. They published nearly ALL the 3rd party games on the platform. Despite having no pedigree in the gaming-console market it managed to sell 102 million units. The defense rests.

Nintendo Partnering With Major Carrier

This one is pretty simple. If Nintendo partners (or has partnered) with a major mobile carrier such as AT&T or Sprint to offer 4G connectivity with the Switch, that would solve a great many problems. Nintendo could offer pricing-plan tiers that give you more access to more features based on price. It's tough to really size-up specifically how they could do it until we know more about what they are offering, but as far as online itself that could be fixed soon.

Supplemental Computing-Device

This is a no-brainier. The SCD MUST HAPPEN.

PERIOD.

It is COMPLETELY absurd that a 2017 video-game console (that THEY keep telling me is a home console FIRST and FOREMOST) has a chip in it barely more powerful than the XBOX 360 at default-settings, yet is UNDER-CLOCKED. Why the reason that is I have no clue. Perhaps to help conserve battery-life? Maybe higher clock-speeds generate too much heat with this chip? I've heard from many people that the Switch is red-hot at times when being taken out of the dock depending on what type of game you are playing. I don't know. What I do know is that it is undeniable that this system was rushed. Had Nintendo of waited they could have used a much more power-efficient Tegra X2 chip, yet still have been more powerful than what the Switch is. Or, they could have just released a regular damned-console like we ASKED THEM TO...........

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..........sigh

Okay, I've calmed down. The Switch is what it is, but it still can get some help. A SCD would greatly help performance of the Switch in docked-mode for many reasons. If the SCD is indeed a GTX 1060 3.5TFGPU with 8GB of RAM, you marry that with the 4GB of RAM (3GB usable) and 512Gflops of the Switch you have something that at worst rivals the PS4 Pro in power, and in the best-case scenario possibly bests the PS4 Pro in performance and closer to XBOX One X. You would be able to get some 4K/60FPS games on the Switch. I would imagine that 1st-party Nintendo titles definitely would be because of the art-styles they use are not graphically-intensive. Wouldn't it be something that when/if Nintendo announces this SCD, the game they use to show off what it can do is the long-awaited Metroid Prime 4? So far all we have is animated GIF file of a title. We've seen nothing of the game itself. If what this new development team working on Metroid Prime 4 have been developing was designed with the SCD in mind, it would be catastrophic to let any of that footage to leak out and then have us see Switch games looking as they do now. By waiting, people can see the difference and the reason why the SCD is necessary. Being that Metroid Prime 4 is a game so many people have been clamouring for, and the insane level of hype that came from Nintendo fans after the reveal, I don't think it would be a hard sell at all to convince people to buy the SCD with Metroid Prime 4 as the carrot dangling in front.

The extra power would also keep the Switch itself much cooler (and possibly prolong the life) because the CPU inside would not have to work as hard. This is where all this comes together.

If Nintendo goes to a major 3rd-party like EA, Activision, Take Two, or Rockstar and says.........

"We know that people don't buy your games on our consoles. We are aiming to fix that. We have a new division within our company designed to work hand-and-hand with 3rd-parties to show how to use our hardware to the fullest. With our Supplemental Computing-Device you have access to enough horsepower to run your most cutting-edge software. We are offering to handle the publishing, and we have ideas of how to use our HD rumble mechanics to "enhance" the game-play experience of some of your most lucrative franchises and here is a tech-demo to show that off."

...THAT could be the catalyst that opens up the floodgates of 3rd-party support back to Nintendo. These companies aren't being unreasonable. They just want Nintendo to work with them more and if Nintendo does this then things will get really interesting. All it takes is one, good collaboration with Nintendo and a 3rd party on a major AAA-multiplat that gives a totally unique experience that everyone WANTS to play on the Switch. Then EVERYBODY is gonna want to bring their games to the Switch.

This is where I have to burst the bubble however. If these things do NOT happen and we get the same canned-excuses from Nintendo we always get, are people going to be mature enough to call Nintendo out and demand better, or will there be more excuses to cover up THEIR excuses and Nintendo fans falling back into the Fox And The Grapes mentality?

"Oh, power doesn't matter anyway. It's all about the GAMES."
"Oh, who cares about voice-chat anyway? I mostly play local multiplayer."
"Oh, who cares about 3rd party games anyway? Nintendo games are better."

These are the same people that can be found arguing that because the Switch runs Unreal Engine 4 it somehow makes it on-par with the PS4. These are the same people that get upset every time a developer announces that a game is NOT coming to the Switch (they did this for the Wii U as well). These are the same people defending the current voice-chat situation.

You can't have it both ways folks. If you don't get something you wanted, don't act like you didn't want it, that it was never important, that you want the opposite of that, and there is something WRONG with people that disagree.

Like I said, they can easily fix every single problem they have. It's still early and in the case of the Switch I can give them some lead-way. Especially since I can easily see this system was rushed. I'll give them a chance to make it right. The only question is, are what we see as problems do THEY consider problems.