Nintendo Switch — Blog

Gaming for ants?

It seems portable gaming PCs are all the rage these days. There’s the venerable Steam Deck, the ASUS Rog Ally, and now the Lenovo Legion Go. All of them builds upon the success of the Nintendo Switch: gaming on the go. Just so long you have a battery bank with you as well. These devices don’t last very long on a single charge.

Obviously, any consumer electronics company with a gaming focus would want to emulate (read: blatantly copy) Nintendo Switch’s success. As of writing it is the third best-selling gaming console of all time, behind only the Nintendo DS (another portable gaming device), and the legendary PlayStation 2. The aim for these companies is to do for the PC-gaming market what the Switch did for console games. The market for people wanting to game on the go - or lying in bed - is massive, apparently.

I personally do not understand the appeal. I want to consume media on as big a screen as possible. Ever since I bought a 65-inch OLED television, I don’t even like watching Youtube videos on my 32-inch Pro Display XDR monitor (not at all humble brag), much less on my Mac laptop screen. I almost never watch video on my iPhone because of how relatively tiny the screen is (I only watch TikTok videos my friends send me). Game-makers and video-makers spend so much time and effort on making a quality visual product, only for people to view them on a tiny phone-sized screen? Kind of sad, actually.

That is why I am not going to spend the $700 or so on one of these portable PC game devices. Its portable-ness means absolutely nothing to me. On a long flight, I’m either reading a book, or listening to podcasts. 15-hours from San Francisco to Hong Kong is not the time to play Baldur's Gate 3. Especially in a cramped economy seat.

To each their own, of course. I’ve a friend playing Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth on remote play to his smartphone. I will be doing so on my 65-inch TV.

Switching it up

One of my coworkers like to play games on this Nintendo Switch during lunch hour. I never quite understood the popularity of these handheld gaming machines. Back in the days of GameBoy it made sense because it was a truly portable device, not all that much weightier than the modern smartphone. The Switch is an iPad in size; a small tablet flanked on the sides by joystick controllers. I never liked the gaming experience on the iPad either. It’s not very ergonomic: painful to the wrists, the constant hunching of the neck.

I much prefer playing on a proper gaming console, sitting comfortably in front of a large television.

But the popularity of the Nintendo Switch is amazing to see. Steam is coming out with a similar device - the Steam Deck - which will play the latest PC games portably. The waitlist for one of those stretches way into the 2022. No doubt scalpers will have a huge payday on eBay. Other handheld PC gaming systems are already out in the market. Linus Tech Tips have reviewed a few of them recently. Indeed, it seems people want the portable experience.

I guess it’s just another way to pass the time while we’re in between things. Is playing on a Switch during lunch time really any different than listening to a podcast, or deathly scrolling through Instagram and twitter? Man’s inability to be still with his thoughts alone have created these varying methods to keep ourselves entertained. Even as we’re taking our dogs out for a stroll, we have to stare at our phones for the latest dopamine hit.

To each their own, obviously. I rather read a book during my lunch hour.