Breaking Free from our Chains

by Aleksander Jess ( Hive account@aleksanderjess ). Follow me on Twitter

     Switch's premiere could have been interpreted as a sign of continuation of Nintendo's trend. Wii was all about player's movement. All about getting the player to get up and move around. Wii U had a controller that had a screen built in. It had a very innovative system of something that could be called AR, which Ubisoft had used in their 2012 video game "ZombiU." Now, the Nintendo Switch is here, and it has COMPLETELY changed the way we think about console gaming. The player is not tied to a TV screen anymore. If you feel like it, you can take your Switch to a park, and play there. Even though, formerly called "project NX" is by some classified as a purely portable system, you have the possibility to play games which Xbox and PlayStation owners play (just to mention NBA 2K18, Doom, and Skyrim) on a big screen.

    So what's so unique about Nintendo's approach? The player is in the center of gameplay. Not the hardware itself.

    "Traditional" consoles, like Xbox, and PlayStation are supposed to wow everybody with their almost photorealistic graphics, higher framerates, higher resolution... You are supposed to be amazed by the game itself. Not by its gameplay exclusively, but rather by how does it look like.

    Wii, Wii U, and Switch have a totally another approach. If we take a look at the hardware of all of the consoles in each generation, then we can quickly draw conclusions - Sony's and Microsoft's consoles were/are WAY faster than their competitor's. There was not much change in terms of how the game is meant to be played, though, in the faster consoles' case.

     With the premiere of Xbox One X and PS4 Pro, we can see that the trend will continue and it does. Sony and Microsft focus on performance, Nintendo - on making sure that a player comfortably enjoys their game in the way the player will want to. As of now, it's highly unlikely that gamers looking to be wowed by graphics, and gamers looking to be wowed by functionality will change their point of view. But assuming that all the companies will stick to their strategies, Nintendo might attract players from the opposing camp, since ARM SoCs are getting faster and faster, allowing for better graphics, and higher framerates.

   If Xbox and PlayStation want to remain dominant, their producers might have to rethink their strategy. I'm sure that millions of players would love to see portable versions of Xbox and PlayStation, allowing people to play games playable on their bigger and heavier brothers. On the other hand, if you don't adapt, you lose.