Nintendo Switch: A Breath of Fresh Air or a Last Gasp?

As the date of the brand new offering from Nintendo, the Nintendo Switch, fast approaches, many diehard Nintendo fans are joyfully praising the Switch before arrival. “It’s a true home console!” you hear them cheering. “It’s portability is astounding!” they reverberate. “OMG, LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD!” they hastily type on message boards worldwide.

Now while I do hope for the Switch’s success, I can’t help but have this horrible pit in my stomach over the sheer rapidity of information Nintendo has released about the Switch. On January 12 the release date was announced to be March 3, less than two months away. In the same breath they announced the system’s capabilities, all the gadgets on the controllers, the price of everything (accessories included), the online features, and most of the release library. All in one conference that was less than two months away from the announced launch of possibly Nintendo’s most important make or break investment of time and money in years. To me, that is worrying.

Yet still, this wasn’t even my first red flag in the Switch’s strange marketing. Months ago in October 2016, they gave a first look at the Switch in its first teaser trailer. I saw it, and my first thought was wow, that looks really cool; I wonder when that comes out. And what happened? Nothing. Nearly three months of no news, no trailers, no information,  and only slight leaks and tight lips on the part of Nintendo. I and the general market lost interest with it and any excitement we had had been lost.

When I say “general market,” I’m not talking about the people who were going to buy it anyway; I’m meaning the market that needs convincing. Families that only have money for one system and want to buy something that the whole family can enjoy. Gamers that are still on the fence about which console to go with. PC gamers interested in investing in a console that does more than a desktop. This late in the generation, those are the markets that Nintendo will make money from. Those are also the markets that Nintendo has traditionally made most of their money from. Those groups of people generally do not impulse buy, and if they want to make a big unnecessary purchase like a gaming console, they prefer to think about and save their money before buying. Springing the release date on these demographics was a foolish move and all but guarantees that those groups will wait months after the Switch’s release date to make a purchase, if they even bother.

Before I get into my greatest worry with the Switch, let’s talk about the facts and what we know about the console.

The Switch is set to release on March 3rd with a price tag of $299.99, undercutting both of its competitors, the PS4 Pro and Xbox One S (while the S does come in different variations, the first model released is the variation I will be using for comparison) by $100 dollars. The Xbox One S and PS4 Pro have already been released, the One S (2 terabyte version) being released August 2 and the Pro being released on November 10. Both of the Switch’s competition have a head start on the market, which means the Switch needs to impress on release. So what games is the Switch launching with?

• 1,2 Switch
• Fast RMX
• Just Dance 2017
• Human Resource Machine
• I Am Setsuna
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
• Little Inferno
• Shovel Knight
• Skylanders: Imaginators
• Super Bomberman R
• World of Goo

Besides Legend of Zelda:BotW, this line-up is horrible. First of all, it’s a rather short list albeit that not all the launch games have been announced yet (this close to release I might add). To give you some idea, the Wii U’s launch library (Nintendo’s last home console and generally considered to be a failure) had 23 launch titles. That’s more than double the titles on a console that failed at launch and never recovered. I’m not saying the Switch needs 40 titles to succeed, but having at least 20 is expected for such a huge and important console. Secondly, over half of these games are re-releases, which on its own isn’t bad, but with such a small library of games it’s nealy crippling. There might as well be five titles on this list. Only five original games for Nintendo’s largest and most important financial investment in years. That is utterly shocking and frightening for the Switch’s future. “Oh, but don’t worry,” the swooning fans say. “Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild will be the best game ever, and you won’t neeeeed any other games until the better games release later this year.” Well sure, Legend of Zelda: BotW is bound to be a good game (it has to be, or the Switch is really in trouble) and it might even be long enough and good enough to play until better, longer titles fill out the library. But even if it is the best game of all time, another problem arises. When those longer titles come out, will you even have enough space for Legend of Zelda AND other titles?

The Switch has only 32 gigabytes of available memory while the PS4 Pro has 1 terabyte, and the XBox One S has 2 terabytes. This amounts to a little more than 31 and 62 times the space of the Switch. Legend of Zelda: BotW takes up nearly half of that space with 13gb of memory, and there have already been games announced that will take up all of that space. That means you only get to play one game. Now Nintendo has come out and said that the Switch does support microSD cards, but who the heck wants to keep track of a bunch of memory cards? Sure you can buy a 512 gigabyte microSD card, but those cost around $200. So if you want your Switch to have more storage you have to either buy, label, and keep track of several 32gb microSD cards (which are around $12 a pop), or you can spend $200 to have storage capacity that still isn’t even close to that of the Xbox One S or PS4 Pro.

Above all of this, though, the most troubling aspect of the Switch is its online functionality. So far, the Switch has been pushed as a pure gaming console for games and nothing else. Previously on the Wii U, you could play online, you had the ability to download media apps such as Netflix and Hulu, you had access to a robust online community, and it was free. On the Switch? You have to pay a monthly subscription (amount undisclosed as of the writing this article) for the online service, there are no plans to have media apps on the Switch, and there are plans to move over the popular Miiverse function. So what do you get? Once a month, you are given a rental of an NES or SNES title for that month. After the month is over, you lose it, and then have to buy it off the store if you want to keep playing. By contrast, on the PS4 Pro and Xbox One S, you get all of the features from the Wii U, with even more apps to choose from, and every month you receive at least one game free of charge that you get to keep. The Switch’s offering, by comparison, is pitiful.

When you lay out the facts, the Switch’s chances seem slim. The lack of notice and tight lips from Nintendo ensured that people lost interest before a release date was even announced. It will take months for Switch sales to increase to a consistent amount. If they ever do at all. The timing of release is poor by coming out so close after the release of the Xbox One S and PS4 Pro, yet after they’ve had time to absorb the market. That means the Switch is going to have a hard time getting traction in the first place. The small selection of titles that are mostly just re-releases of preexisting games is going to hamstring the interest of buying on release, and Legend of Zelda: BotW is not going to be enough to hold off consumers for months until longer gaming experiences are released. On top of that, when the longer games are released, the idea of spending $200 or keeping track of a multitude of different memory cards is going to put a lot of people off. And if anything, the terrible subscription online service will make sure to bury it. There really is nothing else for me to say to Nintendo than to quote Reggie Fils-Aimé, chief operating officer and president of Nintendo of America, “What’s wrong with you?”