Nintendo Switch online paid service will launch in 2018 - $20 per year - Includes unlimited access to a library of old NES games

[Sauron]

7 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

How about the justification that running servers is very very expensive and maintenance on those servers is very very expensive and creating services on top of them like voice chat is very very expensive?

 

We've reached the point where something has to give, either their cut of game prices have to start rising (rising cost of the games that are already more expensive to make on their console), Nintendo has to adopt more abusive dlc practices in first party games, or they have to charge for online services.

 

People bitch about how bad the online services are on Nintendo consoles but at this point they're being compared to paid services. At this point Nintendo doesn't really have a choice if they want to provide a competitive experience.

If the customer bought your system and your game THAT's what pays for servers. It has always been like that. It's bullshit that voice chat services are too expensive when there are dozens of free services that do it just as well if not better. I don't compare nintendo's service to sony's, I compare it to what almost every single multiplayer game on pc offers for free and is 10 times better than the garbage nintento has been providing. And it's even more of a joke now, when you need to use your phone with an app for voice services instead of having it run on the console itself - and they want more money for that garbage?

 

When a multiplayer game is sold, the price of the game must include full online interaction. Why is nintendo suddenly special where they can ask for money for their servers when ea, ubisoft, blizzard (aside from wow, which I'll criticize for this exact reason) etc don't? Not to mention third party games don't use first party servers, making the pay wall even more arbitrary.

 

It's just a dirty way to double dip into your customer's wallet. Period.

[Blebekblebek]

Quote

Why would they invest money into developing a feature (voice chat on the console itself) that would hurt performance, hurt battery life, hurt voice latency, hurt voice quality, and just generally result in a worse experience in a mobile (LTE) use-case?

 

What are you talking about?

[Sniperfox47]

38 minutes ago, Sauron said:

If the customer bought your system and your game THAT's what pays for servers. It has always been like that. It's bullshit that voice chat services are too expensive when there are dozens of free services that do it just as well if not better. I don't compare nintendo's service to sony's, I compare it to what almost every single multiplayer game on pc offers for free and is 10 times better than the garbage nintento has been providing. And it's even more of a joke now, when you need to use your phone with an app for voice services instead of having it run on the console itself - and they want more money for that garbage?

 

When a multiplayer game is sold, the price of the game must include full online interaction. Why is nintendo suddenly special where they can ask for money for their servers when ea, ubisoft, blizzard (aside from wow, which I'll criticize for this exact reason) etc don't? Not to mention third party games don't use first party servers, making the pay wall even more arbitrary.

 

It's just a dirty way to double dip into your customer's wallet. Period.

Why are they special compared to their competition, but only if ignoring their direct competition?

 

What free voice chat do you know of that A) is of good quality, B) isn't by a big data corporation, and C) isn't a freemium experience that offers additional "DLC" or cosmetic content to you if you pay them money *cough*like Discord Nitro*cough*?

 

Also keep in mind that with PC games the reason why servers can be so much cheaper is because they're decentralized. You wind up with one of three outcomes on PCs:

1) servers costs are offloaded to customers by making them run the server (example: CounterStrike Go, CoD, ARK, Terraria, Minecraft, etc.)

 

2) you adopt abusive dlc practices to increase income to balance server costs and ongoing development costs (example: most MMOs, games like Evolve, League of Legends and DotA 2, etc.)

 

3)  you charge users to use your servers (example: pay2play MMOs)

 

14 minutes ago, Blebekblebek said:

 

What are you talking about?

Let's break it down. Keep in mind that this is specifically referring to a mobile use case ie. the switch tethered to your phone for LTE data.

 

Hurt performance: the processing of a voice chat app is a CPU bound task, and the ARM cores on the chip are already strained in a lot of games. CPU resources on the switch are incredibly limited.

 

Hurt battery life: the voice data being transfered over wifi may be a fairly small amount of data but it's still extra data. The more you send via WiFi the more power is used. It would also hurt battery life on your phone as well, because it would have to send the other person's voice data over wifi back to the switch.

 

Hurt voice latency: in a mobile use case your data changes from phone -> LTE -> recipient to switch -> phone -> LTE -> recipient. LTE and wifi both have pretty bad latency, even for UDP traffic, so it'll hurt you're connection latency impacting audio. While an extra 100ms of latency may not sound like much, in an RTC application like voice chat it can break things.

 

Hurt voice quality: has to do with how RTC apps handle real time audio transfer for different bitrates and latency. A good RTC app will drop the quality of the audio to keep a connection, as opposed to constantly dropping in and out.

 

 

[Blebekblebek]

Just now, Sniperfox47 said:

Why are they special compared to their competition, but only if

 

ignoring their direct competition?

 

What free voice chat do you know of that A) is of good quality, B) isn't by a big data corporation, and C) isn't a freemium experience that offers additional "DLC" or cosmetic content to you if you pay them money *cough*like Discord Nitro*cough*?

 

Also keep in mind that with PC games the reason why servers can be so much cheaper is because they're decentralized. You wind up with one of three outcomes on PCs:

1) servers costs are offloaded to customers by making them run the server (example: CounterStrike Go, CoD, ARK, Terraria, Minecraft, etc.)

 

2) you adopt abusive dlc practices to increase income to balance server costs and ongoing development costs (example: most MMOs, games like Evolve, League of Legends and DotA 2, etc.)

 

3)  you charge users to use your servers (example: pay2play MMOs)

 

Let's break it down. Keep in mind that this is specifically referring to a mobile use case ie. the switch tethered to your phone for LTE data.

 

Hurt performance: the processing of a voice chat app is a CPU bound task, and the ARM cores on the chip are already strained in a lot of games. CPU resources on the switch are incredibly limited.

 

Hurt battery life: the voice data being transfered over wifi may be a fairly small amount of data but it's still extra data. The more you send via WiFi the more power is used. It would also hurt battery life on your phone as well, because it would have to send the other person's voice data over wifi back to the switch.

 

Hurt voice latency: in a mobile use case your data changes from phone -> LTE -> recipient to switch -> phone -> LTE -> recipient. LTE and wifi both have pretty bad latency, even for UDP traffic, so it'll hurt you're connection latency impacting audio. While an extra 100ms of latency may not sound like much, in an RTC application like voice chat it can break things.

 

Hurt voice quality: has to do with how RTC apps handle real time audio transfer for different bitrates and latency. A good RTC app will drop the quality of the audio to keep a connection, as opposed to constantly dropping in and out.

 

 

That thing is running Tegra X1 not Pentium 166Mhz, it's not powerful like i7 but this thing isn't slow either.

Xbox 360 was more weaker than Switch and yet it capable for voice chatting.

 

if you worried about lantecy so much, go protest nintendo for not providing RJ45 in the dock.

If you worried about battery life, then don't play Online while ON Portable mode, go dock it.

 

I don't understand how people going this far to justified something like this is beyond me.

[Sniperfox47]

21 minutes ago, Blebekblebek said:

That thing is running Tegra X1 not Pentium 166Mhz, it's not powerful like i7 but this thing isn't slow either.

Xbox 360 was more weaker than Switch and yet it capable for voice chatting.

Umm bullshit. The Xbox 360 was running 3 physical Power cores, each with SMT for a total of 6 logical cores, at 3.2GHz... the thing was a freaking beast...

 

The switch is a RISC ARM processor, running at 1/3rd the clock speed, with 4 physical cores but no hyperthreading.

 

DP or SP FLOP IPC are the same on both of them with vectorization (2DP or 8SP) and are pretty similar without.

 

The Xbox 360 had a hands down *much* more powerful CPU.

 

21 minutes ago, Blebekblebek said:

if you worried about lantecy so much, go protest nintendo for not providing RJ45 in the dock.

If you worried about battery life, then don't play Online while ON Portable mode, go dock it.

The argument was specifically about it being used as a portable console on the go... It's a portable gaming console, not a home console, the whole point of it is being able to play on the go... Nintendo tuned a lot of the system specifically for that use case in case you didn't notice >.>

[goodtofufriday]

4 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Umm bullshit. The Xbox 360 was running 3 physical Power cores, each with SMT for a total of 6 logical cores, at 3.2GHz... the thing was a freaking beast...

 

The switch is a RISC ARM processor, running at 1/3rd the clock speed, with 4 physical cores but no hyperthreading.

 

DP or SP FLOP IPC are the same on both of them (2DP or 8SP).

 

The Xbox 360 had a hands down *much* more powerful CPU.

 

The argument was specifically about it being used as a portable console on the go... It's a portable gaming console, not a home console, the whole point of it is being able to play on the go... Nintendo tuned a lot of the system specifically for that use case in case you didn't notice >.>

Ill just insert a quick 2 cents here. 

 

Nintendo is a global company. They need to consider and provide for the needs of all their markets to succed. If they arent willing to do so, then they will either fail or have to receed to only japan. 

[Blebekblebek]

Okay, at least I know what am I dealing with.

It's pretty obvious that someone doesn't understand IPC was calculated for Both GPU & CPU because it's SOC (well duh)

and the Xbox was only for CPU, and it also had discrete GPU.

But sure I'll go with your scenario, what's holding them down just too add the feature with OPTION to disable it. win-win for everybody.

 

The mighty Xbox 360

 

vs Switch

 

 

Sure... thing sure...

[Sniperfox47]

16 minutes ago, Blebekblebek said:

Okay, at least I know what am I dealing with.

It's pretty obvious that someone doesn't understand IPC was calculated for Both GPU & CPU because it's SOC (well duh)

and the Xbox was only for CPU, and it also had discrete GPU.

But sure I'll go with your scenario, what's holding them down just too add the feature with OPTION to disable it. win-win for everybody.

 

 

 

 

 

No... I'm talking specifically the flops for the CPU...

2 DP floats per cycle at 3.2GHz * 3 cores vs 2 DP floats per cycle at 1GHz * 4 cores is 19.2 vs 8...

 

The Power CPU in the 360 can do literally 2.4x the floating point operations per second as the ARM CPU in the Switch in a perfect optimized perfectly vectored condition.

 

And if you want to say that's not realistic you're right. It's not a realistic comparison because code never perfectly utilizes the cores and games very rarely vectorised nicely, 

 

However in reality the IPC winds up pretty similar anyways, and the Power cpu actually sees better utilization because of SMT.

[TubsAlwaysWins]

Sony and microsoft need to learn

[ARikozuM]

I see the $20 price tag and I cry knowing that I have about $50 in NES and GBC games from the 3DS eShop.

[Eaglerino]

18 hours ago, Blebekblebek said:

I've never met anyone who got excited to pay something and only get offered some old stuff that you've already owned and practically you could get elsewhere for free.

 

But hey maybe that just me.

Maybe if other developers made games people want to play 25 years later they might have to worry about this problem

[dizmo]

21 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

So, about $3 more than the expected lowest price point.

You must be a glass half empty kinda guy