A reader is frustrated by the new actions of Sony and Microsoft and hopes that Nintendo’s new console will force them to up the game.
The latest Reader Features is looking forward to the Nintendo Switch 2, not just for its own sake but as a means to shake up the Xbox and PlayStation.
Microsoft has, rightly, gotten a lot of criticism lately for its competence. Things like announcing Indiana Jones And The Great Circle for the PlayStation 5 directly – which does nothing but buy Xbox or Game Pass – seems like rank stupidity. Over the last two generations, it’s hard not to get the impression that Microsoft isn’t very good at being a video game company. But they are not the only ones.
No one knows what happened to Sony in the last two years, but one of the most common theories is that they abandoned everything that made them successful in the last 30 years in favor of a mode that has passed – which has proven to be short-lived. that Sony has now started a U-turn that will take the same amount of time to complete.
Maybe that’s not what’s going on, maybe there’s something wrong with it, but whatever’s going on at PlayStation HQ right now gives the impression that no one in charge knows what they’re doing. All I can say is thank you Nintendo.
Now, Nintendo isn’t immune to stupid mistakes. Just like the PlayStation now, we don’t know what they thought a few years ago on the Wii, and at the moment the Wii U, and probably never will. But the solution to the mistake is not to try and jump on the first passing bandwagon, but to dig out of the hole with your own hard work, with yet another strange idea – only this is popular.
The Switch is probably the best-selling console of all time and deservedly so, both in terms of the console (whose basic design may have influenced the next-gen Xbox, if not the PlayStation 6 as well) and the games. .
All these generations, Nintendo has been pretty competent at almost everything they’ve done. Almost all the first party games have been good, all the business decisions have been made sense, and they are not even anti-consumer (although the handling of Joy-Con drift is not good).
Compare it to Xbox and PlayStation and they feel very much like the adults in the room. Which they, in a way, given their experience, but even Xbox has been around for 23 years now. They need to be better about it. They shouldn’t make a lot of schoolboy mistakes and shouldn’t look incompetent and inferior compared to a company of a small size.
I’m not here to praise Nintendo as much as I’m criticizing Microsoft and Sony, who have been embarrassing themselves for years now. Maybe the next gen Nintendo console will be another Wii U failure, there is every chance, but I will bet on it not.
What I want is a rational evolution, with some wacky features on top, and an exciting suite of first-party games and an unusual amount of third-party support. If that is the case, then it will give new life to the whole game, and not before time.
It will show up Microsoft and Sony as lazy, complacent goofs that they are. I hope it inspires me to do better, but the reason I believe in Nintendo is that they know about games. It’s not a secret, any gamer can say, but apparently not every publisher.
What matters are the games and the only thing that matters when buying a new console is the exclusive games. Everything else is secondary.
Microsoft never knew about it and Sony forgot about it in a few years. If they can’t force themselves to remember then they will be steamrollered by Nintendo and I will have no sympathy at all when that happens.
By reader Tom Meadows
Reader features do not necessarily reflect the views of GameCentral or Metro.
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