https://www.tweaktown.com/news/92231/nintendo-boosts-spending-as-next-gen-switch-2-looms/index.html#:~:text=According to Nintendo’s 2023 annual,R%26D throughout Fiscal Year 2023.

With a nice chart showing how much of a joke their investment developing the Switch was.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/sony-boost-gaming-unit-with-217-bln-rd-war-chest-2024-nikkei-2023-07-12/

There are literally dozens, minimum, of sources with the same numbers. They’re in annual reports and not secret or debatable at all.

Everything I’ve said is accurate. You’re the one pretending putting one of the worst controllers ever made together with off the shelf parts is somehow comparable to designing custom SoCs on cutting edge nodes.

Do the search yourself with whatever source you trust. They all have the same information.

Sony spent over 2 billion on R&D in gaming last year, which doesn’t count the guaranteed volume that’s also required to get leading edge chips. Nintendo still spent less than a billion (which is a big increase from the complete joke of investment leading into the switch, because the switch didn’t take any research).

Yes, designing the chips is obscenely expensive. Microsoft and Sony aren’t using off the shelf $5 SoCs. They’re partnering with AMD, using AMD’s IP, to make custom designs specifically tailored to their design goals. The fact that you think you can talk about R&D costs without understanding this basic reality is hilarious. Validating high performance custom SoC designs takes a tremendous amount of very limited capacity of small batch test manufacturing ability to get to an end product.

I promise you Sony spent more developing their triggers than Nintendo did on the joycon. That actually is new tech. Putting IR and nfc sensors that already exist onto a controller isn’t that expensive. Developing new tech is where costs come from. Sony isn’t spending a couple hundred million. They’re spending billions, every year.

Even after kicking their investment up for a switch 2 that can’t use an off the shelf chip because there isn’t one, they’re still spending less than half of what Sony does.

Performance is expensive. Building and validating a system around high end custom chips is expensive. They also will not make you units if you don’t make serious volume commitments.

Building a very basic system with cheap, bad, off the shelf components is not expensive.

Compared to any other non-Nintendo platform ever made? No, it didn’t. They used cheap junk tech, exactly like the Switch, and didn’t commit to any meaningful investment in number of units.

The fact that they use hardware not capable of playing modern games is why third parties have very limited involvement with them. It’s why they got ports of 15 year old games instead of most developers of new games even considering putting their games on there. And their bad hardware is a direct result of their unwillingness to invest like everyone else does. Even Valve, who has very limited hardware production, invested far more in the Steam Deck than Nintendo did on the switch.

A console being different is not a financial risk when you spend no money on developing it and no money on producing it.

There was no path to bankruptcy, or even meaningful financial loss, if the Wii failed.

The market they actually get isn’t the point. It’s that they never invest enough money for it to be possible for them to lose meaningful money if their gimmick doesn’t work. If Sony doesn’t sell PS5s, they’re diverse enough that it probably won’t bankrupt them, but it will hurt bad. Nintendo isn’t even willing to invest enough that not selling is a mild inconvenience. They just refuse to invest.

It’s the emptiest open world ever made. Shrines take longer to load than to beat.

Bookstores are also dying, and stores are abandoning physical media of all kinds because people don’t buy them.

Thats not how console releases work. Games usually get technologically more advanced as the hardware ages. TotK is way more advanced than BotW. Also: I’m not following your point here.

It’s how they’re supposed to work. That ARM CPU was tapped out before the switch launched. The entire cost of porting to Nintendo systems is always for the same reason, making the obscene downgrades visually and mechanically mandatory to get games running on their system. There isn’t performance to eke out of it. It’s bad.

The switch has a huge markup. Cartridges are actually expensive. Nothing else is. Their costs were low because they used tech that would have been thrown in the trash if they didn’t buy it, and they spent virtually nothing on R&D. They absolutely could have made money on an extremely small market. It’s what they’ve been doing for years. Even without their huge cash reserves, they could have sold 500k switches and wouldn’t have lost money. Again, that’s their entire philosophy as a company. They do not take financial risks.

DMCA subpoenas are nonsense. Having a judge rule on sufficient cause should always be the standard for any subpoena, and DMCA subpoenas can be signed off by a clerk.

A judge evaluating the merit and determining that there’s cause for a subpoena is fine. But it’s supposed to be the first step, not reliant on a platform pushing back and spending resources to make it happen.

Breath of the Wild was a good step on one aspect of open world, destroyed by not knowing that open worlds still need actual content. It’s a good tech demo. It’s a terrible game. And it can’t be “innovation that sells a system” on the Switch when it was a port that was already available before the Switch.

Try getting a physical copy of big, successful TV shows now. Many of them don’t exist at all. Some movies never get physical copies.

Nintendo provided a handheld that just met the bare minimum threshold to play their games. But the argument for physical being acceptable is about all games, not the 1% that are from Nintendo.

The hardware wasn’t expensive to make. Again, that’s their entire design philosophy. They took junk chips nvidia had no use for dirt cheap and screens you can get on a $30 tablet. There was no meaningful up front R&D cost and there was a very small cost per unit compared to the other consoles. They didn’t invest anything in the Switch. Their “system seller” wasn’t even a new game.

It’s always expensive to port to Nintendo consoles because they always use ancient technology.

Giving up legitimate access to a game until you buy it again is a big cost you’re ignoring, as is the time you invest in selling. You’re also ignoring that the cost of a bad experience goes way above the couple bucks involved.

They didn’t meaningfully innovate on software. They “innovated” on hardware by using a tablet and giving it a dock to make older games viable on handheld that weren’t before. Which is fine; it demonstrated the market for handhelds playing real games even with the worst controller the world has ever seen, and kickstarted the steam deck and a bunch of PC copycats. But collectors are their core market. If they do a switch 2 that doesn’t do physical games, it will fail.

Physical media has mostly died out. Streaming has almost entirely replaced music, TV, and movies. Ereaders are still growing, but they’re also a huge market, and libraries support multiple ebook borrowing apps with different libraries because ebooks are so much of their job now.

Nintendo makes a handful of games a year. Most switch games aren’t from Nintendo. Most switch games don’t work well without updates. And if you want to talk about how popular the switch specifically is instead of the fact that their core audience is physical collectors, all of the switch’s popularity is because it could play third party games.

You don’t need Nintendo servers to get digital games.

The used market has massive compromises that you’re just ignoring. It doesn’t matter if it’s “only” 1% chance of a bad transaction. Bad transactions happen, and it’s a risk that nullifies much of the benefit if you experience it.

Yes, I did. It was the first post. They couldn’t run a profitable gaming division without collectors. They wouldn’t go broke because they have ridiculous cash reserves, but they would have bailed on gaming at some point because collectors are a big chunk of their sales.

People did it because they didn’t have a choice. That doesn’t mean they were OK with it, or that anyone would have chosen not to have everything instantly available given the choice. That choice exists now.

You don’t need to rip cartridges to play them. After the hardware gives out: I’m relying on the piracy community here.

I’d need to rip them to play them now. Carrying around cartridges isn’t acceptable. I have no issue relying on data preservation communities to preserve access to my data.

Half those cartridges have junk builds that won’t work without external updates by the way. You need the internet to get to the actual functional version regardless.

3DS or Wii can get digital games just fine.

I have no interest in the used market. Even if I could get 90% back on every game every time to abandon access to a game, the fact that it would require carrying physical games would make the value proposition completely unacceptable to me.

Most games aren’t that big. Especially switch games. Yes, I have a large micro SD to hold them all. I didn’t say I’m not an edge case; I made it clear that silly collector shit is half the reason Nintendo has a market.

I have plenty of games I haven’t played recently. That doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that if I want to play it tomorrow, I can play it without hassle wherever I am. Anything short of that is not owning the game.

I’ll have access long after the hardware gives out, with no need for the obnoxious process of ripping hundreds of cartridges. Digital is forever; DRM isn’t.

I have no interest in selling a game or hardware. I never have and never will. You choose between getting half of what they’ll sell it for or spending a bunch of time and trusting some random stranger not to screw you. Both options are worse than just keeping your stuff.

That’s what happens when your core manufacturing philosophy is “withered technology”. You get old tech people have figured out.

Yes, I absolutely want to be able to play any game I own on that platform at any time. That’s the entire reason I bought the game. Being restricted to the library on one platform is already a massive concession.

“You can only play this game if you preemptively lug it around with you in case you want to play it today” is not an acceptable condition of a purchase to me.

The switch is a handheld. So most places I go?

I have no interest in physical games. I’m not willing to carry around 300 cartridges or only have access to a small portion of my library. But Nintendo has to know that physical game collectors are a big portion of their audience (with probably more than any other platform in either raw number or proportion). They can’t abandon physical.

lol Nintendo are the only ones who get their games pirated, because they use antique hardware.

I pay for my content on basically every other platform. I have a hacked pirate switch because Nintendo’s business practices are particularly obnoxious.

Is it “justified”? Fuck if I care. But they’re the only games I don’t legally acquire, and it’s because they’re jackasses.

My issue was before that.

I’m not willing to give my real IP for almost anything, let alone illegal activity. It’s a hard dealbreaker.

For anything where you would ever expect a predictable, useful outcome to an arbitrary input. There is no possible path to LLMs ever doing anything close to that.

LLMs aren’t driving cars. LLMs aren’t doing financial modeling. Those are entirely different tools with heavily hand crafted models to specific applications.

Anyone using an LLM to provide therapy should get multiple life sentences in prison regardless of outcomes. There is no possible way to LLMs ever being actually useful for therapy. It’s just a random text generator that’s tuned well enough to sound good. It has no substance and the underlying tech cannot possibly develop substance.