#308: Loyalty scheme

Yesterday, as you have doubtless already seen, Nintendo finally blew the bloody doors off its next console. And, honestly, if you had asked me a few days ago to design the Switch 2 of my dreams, I’m not sure it would have been that different from the one we’re getting on June 5. More grunt in handheld mode, including a 1080p, 120Hz screen, and a boost-enabled dock to push 4K60 HDR visuals on the big TV. Top-tier, current-gen thirdparty support. Enhanced versions of the Zeldas. GameCube games on Switch Online, at last! Some weird system-level stuff — the GameChat feature, the camera, the Joy-Con mouse mode — for developers to play around with. Really all it was missing was a new 3D Mario, and my inner optimist, finally unleashed after a miserable couple of years, is this morning screaming bear-chested from the roof of Hit Points Towers that we’ll see one at not-E3. Might ask him to clean out the gutters while he’s up there.

There is, admittedly, an elephant in the room — one shaped suspiciously, and quite weirdly for an elephant if I'm honest, like a dollar sign. While the hardware is actually cheaper than I feared it was going to be while watching the Direct, just about everything else about the way this console is being monetised has the distinct whiff of a money-grab. The biggest of all is the price of games, the $80 tag slapped on big-ticket firstparty games — and, erm, Super Mario Party Jamboree — ushering in a new era of game pricing barely five years after Jim Ryan dragged us all kicking and screaming into his $70 utopia. I realise 2020 was not long ago, but look at all that has happened in the world since; however reluctantly, I get it. Someone was bound to do it at some stage, and no doubt everyone else will soon follow Nintendo's lead. Welcome, then, to the age of $80 videogames. God, I almost miss Jim Ryan. Almost.

Backwards compatibility is similarly bogged down in pricing and other strategic shenanigans, making what should be a headline feature for the console seem disappointingly undercooked. While Switch 2 will be able to play your existing library of Switch games, they will play and run identically to the way they did on Switch 1, without making use of the substantially increased power of the new console. I assume this is a business decision, rather than a technical constraint: while the Nvidia innards no doubt come with all manner of scaling technology and performance-boosting malarkey, Nintendo wants early adopters buying new games, and ponying up for the scant handful of bespoke ‘Switch 2 Edition’ versions of some of Switch 1’s best and brightest games (and, erm, Super Mario Party Jamboree). With The Optimist still wailing away on the rooftops — he’s on about an ARMS sequel now, bless his cottons — my cynical side would like to predict that Nintendo will ‘unlock’ system-level enhancements for backwards-compatible games a few years into the console’s life, when the focus shifts from early adopters with a money/sense imbalance to the wider, more casual and distinctly more cautious parts of the audience who are yet to upgrade. A bit annoying, yes, but Switch 2 Editions will be free to subscribers of the upper tier of the Switch Online subscription service, and quite frankly I’d have handed over £400 just to play the Zeldas at 60fps without enduring the guilt of emulation. 

There are other little injustices buried in the margins of this thing. Switch 2 Welcome Tour is pitched as a cheery game-like exploration of the hardware’s feature set, purporting to do for Switch 2 what Astro’s Playroom did for PS5, with a few key differences: it looks boring and rubbish, and is a paid download rather than a free pack-in. Sheesh. Accessory prices are also grim: the Switch 2 Pro Controller, tagged up at £75 in the UK, is a 50% markup on the Switch 1 version (thank god you can still use the old one). And as m’colleague Kyle Bosman sagely pointed out in his video this morning, the C button, which governs the new subscription-funded GameChat feature, is effectively a button you have to pay in order to press, a regrettable first for the videogame industry. Yuck.

All of this is fairly easily explained by the worsening state of the global economy, the weak yen, the recent health of the videogame industry and, quite bluntly, the fact that Nintendo both likes and needs money. But so do I, and while I have the luxury of having both the available funds and the professional obligation to go all-in on Switch 2 at launch, I realise I am something of an outlier. Tot up everything required to get the best out of this thing and you are looking at a sum of money that even the most ardent of Nintendo sickos may struggle to justify, particularly in an economic climate that seems to be getting worse by the day hour minute. For years now Nintendo has had the luxury of serving a passionately engaged, endlessly forgiving audience that puts no price on its loyalty. That loyalty, however, is about to face its biggest test yet, and even our friend on the roof seems a bit worried about its chance of success.

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