Comment by toddmorey

1 day ago

Is it just entirely unprofitable to sell hardware devices unsubsidized without locking it all into restrictive ecosystems & services?

6 comments

toddmorey

Reply
monomial  1 day ago

Normal profit is not enough any more. It must be 1000x return, infinite growth, monopolize an entire industry style profit.

  • 33d3  21 hours ago

    erm since when was normal profit considered enough?

    Normal profit is what an investor demands at the absolute bare minimum. They dont 'feel' better off if its not being beaten.

Elsewhereindeed  21 hours ago

Nintendo manages to squeak out a margin on hardware unlike the other big players. However, this is only because they trail behind in specs, and their devices are simply cheaper.

  • p1necone  21 hours ago

    My weird take: I wish Nintendo would ship an even less powerful system.

    The switch and switch 2 are both just powerful enough that developers can release straight ports of their AAA titles that were developed for other systems, but at the cost of significantly degrading framerate/framepacing, visuals, nothing ever running at native resolution etc.

    I would much rather it was more like the Wii and all their previous handhelds where the performance gap between it and the other contemporaneous systems was so big that developers had to develop bespoke games for the system, and ports had to be ground up rewrites.

    Everything was so much more playable, and by buying those systems you had access to an entirely different library of games to choose from, rather than the current situation where it's just the first party Nintendo titles that differ from what's available on all the other more powerful systems.

    • darkfloo  21 hours ago

      Very few non first party game where worth playing on the ds if you had access to anything else to be honest, at least when I was a kid. I do wish we had actually pocketable ish consoles from the big 3, but it seems like this market is covered by android devices.