*** The Official Nintendo Switch 2 ***

Emlyn_Dewar said:
It's good to see the tide starting to turn when it comes to Nintendo. Even some of the diehards are starting to open their eyes.
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I have several friends who are diehard Nintendo fans who have yet to buy a Switch 2. They aren't happy with Nintendo's current direction or the lack of major IP titles at launch eg. a new 3D Mario platformer, Zelda, Animal Crossing etc.

And Nintendo themselves are aware of the discontent. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has received multiple feedback surveys enquiring why I haven't used my Switch very much, not bought much software etc. Let's hope they listen to the feedback.
 
I don't recall quite so much outcry when Breath of the Wild launched with a Day 1 Expansion Pass available for purchase that bought you additional content in the following months/year. I guess this is as much fatigue with the industry approach to additional content in general as much as it is Nintendo specifically doing anything differently/new here.

The DKB content sounds poor value and almost like a 'deleted scene' element of the game that didn't really knit into the main game so they've packaged it off separately. This isn't the worst approach to DLC ever, as it doesn't sound like it makes the original game feel like it isn't the complete package if you were to ignore it entirely, it's just a little surprising they've made it available so soon - I wonder if the backlash would have been lessened if they'd released it just prior to Christmas or even next summer.
 
xaldub said:
As for the increasing cost of making games : Team Cherry and Sandfall Interactive ( E33 ) have both shown that small, agile & passionate development teams can produce content that is just as good, if not better, than AAA studios. It's not the consumer's fault that the video game industry has allowed itself to become bloated, corpulent and lazy.
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I think the issue is that fundamentally games are big business. Hollow knight made a huge amount of money for an indie game but it wouldn't take that much for that money to have evaporated if they had a smallish dev team.

It took them 7 years to complete Silksong. No company is going to greenlight that sort of dev time on a game unless its almost guaranteed to print money. They can also only do that because of the success of the first game and the fact they are a tiny studio.

I hear what you are saying but the fact is that the vast majority of indie games go nowhere and make no money. Building a good game isn't enough either. You need to strike lucky with word of mouth/hype or you need the right people backing you and all this takes money and many backers will expect profits.

Gamers whinge that they want good games at reasonable prices but they keep buying pokemon games which look like they came from the ps3 era at best and are about as lazy as they come. They buy call of duty every year. They spending hundreds or thousands every year on FIFA when its had a lick of paint and a few stats changed since the previous year.

The buyer speaks loudly and the games that do the best are generally the massive, safe and dull franchises, usually filled with micro-transactions.
 
xaldub said:
I have several friends who are diehard Nintendo fans who have yet to buy a Switch 2. They aren't happy with Nintendo's current direction or the lack of major IP titles at launch eg. a new 3D Mario platformer, Zelda, Animal Crossing etc.
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I struggle to understand the real issue here tbh. If those are the games people need in order to enjoy the system, I think that's fine just to wait.

They can be especially complex games to design and develop and just take a lot of time, they need to introduce new ideas for them too - expectations are very high.
 
fez said:
I hear what you are saying but the fact is that the vast majority of indie games go nowhere and make no money. Building a good game isn't enough either.
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That's not true - the indy scene has been strong for many years. Sure, Silksong is an outlier in terms of the incredible amount of success it's had but plenty of other titles have been very profitable eg. Stardew Valley, Balatro, Slay the Spire, Monster Train, Terraria, Valheim etc.

And yes, the video game industry has become "big business" - to its detriment. Corporate greed now rules the roost, which will ultimately lead to a collapse, similar to what happened to the music & film industries when they were top dogs.
 
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megalomanic said:
I struggle to understand the real issue here tbh. If those are the games people need in order to enjoy the system, I think that's fine just to wait.

They can be especially complex games to design and develop and just take a lot of time, they need to introduce new ideas for them too - expectations are very high.
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Of course they can wait until some titles are released that pique their interest. But as I said, it's not just a lack of new games ... it's Nintendo's predatory practices that are adding to the discontent.

Are expectations unreasonbly high ? I don't think so ... not when companies are ramping up prices. Consumer perception is that value / quality is going down - and this is backed up by many surveys illustrating that most gamers now only buy 1-2 games per year max.
 
xaldub said:
That's not true - the indy scene has been strong for many years. Sure, Silksong is an outlier in terms of the incredible amount of success it's had but plenty of other titles have been very profitable eg. Stardew Valley, Balatro, Slay the Spire, Monster Train, Terraria, Valheim etc.

And yes, the video game industry has become "big business" - to its detriment. Corporate greed now rules the roost, which will ultimately lead to a collapse, similar to what happened to the music & film industries when they were top dogs.
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You do realise how many games are released every month in the indie space. When I say that the vast majority go nowhere, I mean that the vast vast vast majority go nowhere. Pointing at 6 games that have done well doesn't disprove that. Stardew valley is 9 years old. Slay the spire is 6 years old. Terraria is 14 years old. Hollow Knight is 8 years old. Thats not exactly a ringing endorsement of the ease of releasing a successful indie game when many of the ones you mentioned are years old at this point.

The simple fact is that the amount of money that flows into the indie game space is insignificant vs the AAA studios. The indie scene is strong but that doesn't mean that many of them are doing well out of it. The games they produce are fantastic but thats just the cream rising to the top. By are large most of them fail.
 
fez said:
You do realise how many games are released every month in the indie space. When I say that the vast majority go nowhere, I mean that the vast vast vast majority go nowhere. Pointing at 6 games that have done well doesn't disprove that. Stardew valley is 9 years old. Slay the spire is 6 years old. Terraria is 14 years old. Hollow Knight is 8 years old. Thats not exactly a ringing endorsement of the ease of releasing a successful indie game when many of the ones you mentioned are years old at this point.

The simple fact is that the amount of money that flows into the indie game space is insignificant vs the AAA studios. The indie scene is strong but that doesn't mean that many of them are doing well out of it. The games they produce are fantastic but thats just the cream rising to the top. By are large most of them fail.
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I could literally list hundreds more. You make it sound like the indy scene is at death's door with only a few making ends meet. It really isn't that bad at all.

And most of that money that "flows" into the AAA coffers is from predatory practices ie. MTX
 
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It's easy to forget just how many games do actually appear each year - i'm going to use Steam's sales data as an example because it's easy to get hold of - so far in 2025 there have been nearly 13,500 games released on Steam. Thirteen and a half thousand games. In just shy of 9 months. An average of 1,500 games released per month.

Whilst the indie scene is no doubt doing well for a good few developers, I think @fez's point stands that an overwhelming amount of releases go absolutely nowhere in terms of success and most of those other developers are almost certainly not making enough money to sustain themselves even short term.
 
Yeah something like 97% of indie developers don't make enough money from their games to support themselves unfortunately. We've seen some great successes, but there are so many trying to make it compared to the number of AAA developers around.

For me it feels like the best time to be gaming personally, in terms of quality and quantity, I feel absolutely spoilt.
 
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Kenai said:
I don't recall quite so much outcry when Breath of the Wild launched with a Day 1 Expansion Pass available for purchase that bought you additional content in the following months/year. I guess this is as much fatigue with the industry approach to additional content in general as much as it is Nintendo specifically doing anything differently/new here.
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I personally feel there's a difference between how the two are framed. An expansion pass for more content, even if announced at launch, feels a lot different from a insta-dropped DLC, set amongst a barrage of dubious pricing decisions.

The exact moment I thought Nintendo ought to get stuffed was when I bought a Mario Party game on switch that had like 3-4 very basic boards, compared to the imaginatively designed multi-route boards from the N64 era. It was aggressively light on content.
 
Got round to watching the direct last night, only Metroid interests me this year, already have the Mario Galaxy games on the Wii and not interested in playing upscaled version.
Next year I'll probably order the new Yoshi game, the Dragon Quest reimagined game and Fire Emblem, up to now.
Will get the new Resident Evil on the PC.
 
I tried the multiplayer beta test for Crossworlds a few weekends back on PC and it didn't really click for me at all, I can see the value in it though.

Hades II preloaded, really looking forward to this one.

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