Archive link: https://archive.ph/NF2r0

At some point, getting Nintendo would be a career moment and I honestly believe a good move for both companies. It’s just taking a long time for Nintendo to see that their future exists off of their own hardware. A long time… :-)

Email chain between Phil Spencer, Chris Capossela, and Takeshi Numoto discussing the potentially hostile purchase of Nintendo, ZeniMax, WB Games, and TikTok

  • You can’t compare a console to an Android tablet. They didn’t give developers any reason to target the shield tablet; of course there weren’t going to be any games. And the built in controllers to make it a handheld were what made the switch the switch anyways.

    Switch games never at any point looked current gen. They could support some games with current gen mechanics, in a handheld form factor. The switch had no path to success if it wasn’t a handheld. There are some people who only use it docked, but nowhere near enough that it was remotely possible to build enough momentum for third party support.

    Microsoft has their own strengths. If they had made the Switch, there would have been less compelling first party games, but there would have been a lot more early third party buy in and it would have been a wash. Ultimately the fact that it was a viable handheld capable of some meaningful 3D worlds would have sold it.

    • Switch games never at any point looked current gen. They could support some games with current gen mechanics, in a handheld form factor.

      What are you talking about? One of the first games they brought out on the system was Doom 2016, a VERY good looking game at the time. The fact that a handheld could run it was mind-blowing, even at half the framerate.

      • Doom looked awful on the switch. It took an extremely heavy dose of adaptive resolution, with a bunch of effects rendered at 360p, and heavy motion blur just to get the game to function at 30FPS.

        And it’s a game that uses very careful design to run extremely well on very old PC hardware.