Crazy progress happening crazy fast. Some people are already porting Switch 2 games to PC via AI recompilation.
Plus, someone earlier shared Mario Kart World running on Switch 1 (albeit buggy and incomplete).
Crazy progress happening crazy fast. Some people are already porting Switch 2 games to PC via AI recompilation.
Plus, someone earlier shared Mario Kart World running on Switch 1 (albeit buggy and incomplete).
The problem with that is, that this makes it less likely to sell consoles. These companies get lot of money from third party games, and they need to sell a lot of consoles. And at this point, exclusivity seems to be the only working strategy for consoles. Do I like it? No. I won’t buy another Nintendo console, stopped doing decades ago. I rather not play those games, or wait until they can be emulated or are de/recompiled.
I played Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom on Yuzu. Both together I think close to 400 hours. If Nintendo sold the games on PC, even if its their own launcher, I would probably have purchased it.
I hate these takes. Just pirate it and be happy, hypocritical bullshit like these trying to make some idealism out of theft.
Who you calling hypocritical bullshit?
In most of not all cases, traditional gaming consoles are sold at a loss. A cursory search says that’s true for the switch 2 as well, but I have not investigated with any effort.
It really seems like it would behoove everyone to sell their games on PC, whether that’s their own client or an existing one like Steam. Nintendo will never get a dollar from me because I will never buy their hardware. I would however at least consider buying some of their titles if they were available on Steam. I’m definitely not alone.
As Gaben said “Piracy is a service problem”. Unfortunately for Nintendo, if they won’t the people will. I am not a fan of most AI stuff but the whole LLM powered de/recompilation thing this year has been wild to see. I don’t think it has dawned on Nintendo and Sony yet that their castle walls are being torn down and their hardware exclusivity isn’t going to hold like it has in the past.
I see that Microsoft is trying to please the hoards with Xbox labs but it feels like desperation rather than acceptance.
There are really only two console manufacturers left, Sony and Nintendo, and only Nintendo never allows any of their first party titles to come to PC, ever. Not all PS5 exclusives come to PC, but many, if not most, do get ported to PC, at least eventually. Permanent console exclusivity really is a dying practice, as it should be.
It was dying even before emulation/decomps. The amount of Ps5 exclusives after 6 years (in two weeks) is grim at best.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:PlayStation_5-only_games
I wonder how popular PC gaming is in Japan, as I believe mobile gaming (phones and handhelds) is huge.
It is becoming pretty big but they fulfill different use cases. A Switch or a phone is great for commute and a PC can’t really replace it yet. Decks are commonly sold out there but it’s a lot bulkier. I’ve been trying using a AYN Thor but that experience might be a bit too unintuitive to the average consumer to set up.
If Nintendo released an Android app, I’d be fine with that.
Closest we can do is Nintendo Today and Mario Run.
Valve has entered the chat
While I agree, the “consoles” from Valve are still PCs with an open platform. A “true” console is a closed walled garden, where only they control it (unless hacked off course). The systems they put out are most console like than any PC before, while still remaining the open platform of it. I just don’t call them a game console.
Modern gaming consoles are just PCs with a weird OS and case. It’s not like the days of yore where every console had custom motherboards and infrastructure
When I say “true” console, I’m not speaking about the architecture. As said a true console is locked down in the operating system and eco system. What makes a PC a PC is the open platform and not depending on a single hardware manufacturer and eco system.
I know that you can install Linux and Steam on Playstation 5 and play Steam games native without emulation, because its just PC hardware. Also that’s one of the reasons why on PC we don’t need to emulate everything from the PS5, because it can just run most of the CPU directly.
You’re right, but Sony seems to be moving away from the PC release strategy now
Not anymore unfortunately, Sony said this year they’ll stop porting their games to PC at all. There might be exceptions to live service games but don’t expect any of their games on PC anymore.
Well, I expect their games on PC, just not ported by Sony.
PC is the endgame. I also wish console exclusivity should stop, but can’t imagine it will. Either they embrace the open platform, or they have a closed walled garden. Either way exclusivity will remain a “problem”, even on PC with different launchers. If we ignore unintended ways to play (emulation, virtualization, recompilation and so on).
Sony doesn’t want their games to come on PC anymore, at least single player games. So while currently its a mixed bag, it will be worse again in future. Thank god Microsoft puts their games on PC too. And Nintendo, well I have no big hope. But I also never thought we would have seen Nintendo first party IP games on smartphones, even single player games. I do not expect the mainline games to be sold on PC anytime soon.
I would love it, if at least those games come to PC. And maybe the emulated games from their subscription service (N64, SNES, Game Boy and so on) could be made available. Maybe their soundtracks and so on. Nintendo wouldn’t lose anything here, just gain, because those games are already available. So it’s not something exclusive to their service.
I think early next year there is going to be a cultural moment in gaming that will be to big to ignore. That being the first team that manages to rip and recompile GTA6 to the PC. It will be the gaming equivalent of before and after the moon landing.
Could you expand on this?
GTA6 is a console exclusive so far, there might be a PC version in a year or two but for now, we have no idea.
But with the hype around its release and the growing use of LLMs to decompile games to be ported to the PC, this has become the high ground. One of the biggest game launches in years of a golden franchise and the PC is cut out get again. But now the people have just enough tools to take it into their own hands.
This is a two stage thing. They need to hack a current PS5/Xbox so they can grab the game image, then have to do the work of a quick port to the PC. Easy to say but difficult to do. A few years back it would have been near impossible but now even with local LLM models you can get agents do a lot of grunt work and make this possible.
There was always a race for clout in the cracking scene since the 1980s of who could get the latest games cracked, they had the change to slap their name and logo on the launcher. Nowadays it isnt just cracking for the same machine, it is liberating it from the host platform. It also kinda makes it open source… So very illegal but that has never stopped people in the past.
I’m not saying it will happen, but there is a highly motivated bunch of people that want to make it happen.
The analogy of the moon landing is simple. Many people tend to see it as a scientific thing when it was entirely geopolitical. The moon landing was the USs way of saying, we are better than the USSR, it was also saying “If we can put a man on the moon, we can put a nuke anywhere”. It was a huge paradigm shift in the world powers.
GTA6 being liberated by the people would be saying “Hey you can no longer confine us to your platforms!”. It was be a huge shift in the way they would have to treat customers, it could be a good thing long term.