Hardware Would a Switch Pro receive actual games?

[aykay55]

There’s no doubt a more powerful Switch Pro will come out sometime this year. Leaks say that the Switch Pro will use either the Tegra X2 or the Xavier chipset. It’s up to Nintendo what they want to clock it at, but it seems apparent it would be at roughly the same power as a base Xbox One or maybe even a base PS4 while docked. If Nintendo suddenly solved all the Switch’s power problems and brought it on par with the base consoles of its competitors, would developers suddenly start bringing their games to the Switch, or would they still refrain from doing so? Developers are used to developing two different versions of games for their competitors, so developing for both the original Switch and the Switch Pro wouldn’t be that hard, and the leaked Switch Mini will have the same power as the original Switch so they only would have to develop for two systems. Some might argue the Switch actually has four states to run in, Switch undocked, Switch docked, Switch Pro undocked, and Switch Pro docked. The thing is, most Switch games run on a dynamic resolution, so in Switch Pro undocked, it could just run Switch undocked at full power with no extra work needed. So really, devs would need to develop for three states: Switch undocked, Switch docked, and Switch Pro docked. This is the same as the Xbox One, Xbox One S, and Xbox One X. The Switch already has a pretty big playerbase of over 25 million people, and with a Switch Pro will no doubt grow even more, so do you think this would be enough incentive for AAA developers to bring their games now?

 

[Rahkeesh]

*Leaks* say that they need to move off of 20 nm. *Speculation* says X2 or Xavier, but its probably wrong because Mariko looks to hackers like a custom fork of X1.

If the "pro" is actually a $300ish replacement for the original as you'd expect from abandoning 20 nm, rather than a luxury upgrade that exists alongside the original, base xbox level performance still seems like a pipe dream. Not to mention that the mini will probably have zero performance upgrade, using the efficiency gains to shrink everything down while retaining the same battery life and thermals, yet will remain a sizable portion of the market that devs will continue to target.

None of this really addresses the #1 problem with 8th gen ports anyway, which is not performance but rather the miniscule size of cartridges and average SD cards consumers are willing to buy. The AAA trend of massive open-world games with high-res 8th gen textures, buttressed by gobs of DLC, are a total non-starter for that reason alone; its not feasible to simply downgrade texture quality in those kind of games, because you also need to make big cuts into variety to make everything fit without looking horrible. In other words, quite a bit more effort than bringing over 7th gen ports that easily run on the system and tend to sell pretty well.

 

[x65943]

The new switch would start with a very small install base

Meaning any game released exclusively for it would have a very small target audience

I think they'll focus on higher resolution with the beefier switch, and refrain from exclusives

I could see GameCube vc offered on the new swirch ala snes being new 3ds exclusive