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Nintendo Completely Sat Out the Video Game Graphics Wars. It's Winning Anyway. (sherwood.news) 70
Manny Fidel, reporting for Sherwood News: When you're immersed in a game like "Cyberpunk 2077," it's easy to get lost in its realism. As you run around the crowded streets of Night City, you notice the reflections of the city lights and neon signs in the puddles when it rains. Even the complexion and texture of a character's skin are enamoring. At full power, the game, created by CD Projekt Red, is a graphical marvel. It's also a symbol of a decades-long arms race between the biggest video game companies to make things look as real as possible. And then there are Nintendo games.
Take 2022's "Pokemon Scarlet" and "Pokemon Violet" on the Nintendo Switch. Despite being the latest releases in a legendary franchise, in terms of its graphics they could've easily been published 15 years ago. It's a perfect example of how, sometimes to the frustration of gamers, Nintendo seemingly refuses to step into the present day. None of its flagship games really compete with the rest of the industry's optical experiences. The graphics of games like "Red Dead Redemption 2," "Starfield," and "The Last of Us: Part II" are decades ahead of Nintendo.
But here's the thing: Nintendo doesn't have to catch up, nor does it want to. "Pokemon Scarlet" and "Pokemon Violet" sold 10 million copies during their launch weekend alone. According to IGN, Nintendo is responsible for three of the top five bestselling video game consoles of all time. Its characters -- Mario and Luigi, Link and Zelda, Pikachu and Ash -- have defined and are constantly redefining the industry. Nintendo is a money machine. It's been raking in more than $10 billion in revenue (more than 1.6 trillion yen) annually for the past several years, and its profits have grown sharply, topping out at about $3.3 billion in the fiscal year ended March 2024. For comparison, in its latest fiscal year, Sony's gaming division generated $29.1 billion of revenue and an operating profit of nearly $2 billion. Nintendo posted $11.4 billion of revenue and an operating profit of $3.6 billion.
Take 2022's "Pokemon Scarlet" and "Pokemon Violet" on the Nintendo Switch. Despite being the latest releases in a legendary franchise, in terms of its graphics they could've easily been published 15 years ago. It's a perfect example of how, sometimes to the frustration of gamers, Nintendo seemingly refuses to step into the present day. None of its flagship games really compete with the rest of the industry's optical experiences. The graphics of games like "Red Dead Redemption 2," "Starfield," and "The Last of Us: Part II" are decades ahead of Nintendo.
But here's the thing: Nintendo doesn't have to catch up, nor does it want to. "Pokemon Scarlet" and "Pokemon Violet" sold 10 million copies during their launch weekend alone. According to IGN, Nintendo is responsible for three of the top five bestselling video game consoles of all time. Its characters -- Mario and Luigi, Link and Zelda, Pikachu and Ash -- have defined and are constantly redefining the industry. Nintendo is a money machine. It's been raking in more than $10 billion in revenue (more than 1.6 trillion yen) annually for the past several years, and its profits have grown sharply, topping out at about $3.3 billion in the fiscal year ended March 2024. For comparison, in its latest fiscal year, Sony's gaming division generated $29.1 billion of revenue and an operating profit of nearly $2 billion. Nintendo posted $11.4 billion of revenue and an operating profit of $3.6 billion.
Starfield? (Score:2)
"The graphics of games like "Red Dead Redemption 2," "Starfield," and "The Last of Us: Part II" are decades ahead of Nintendo."
Re:Starfield? (Score:4, Informative)
Starfield was a pretty shit game, really... but it is pretty (if you've got the hardware for it)
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If by pretty you mean pretty shitty, the game looks about 10 years old.
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4K Ultra with HDR on an OLED is fucking stunning.
I will grant you that the faces are pretty comically dated.
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They're referring to graphics.
Starfield was a pretty shit game, really... but it is pretty (if you've got the hardware for it)
I keep wanting to buy Starfield, but then I read the reviews and think, not at bloody £41.
However I've been saying for years now, graphics don't matter.
You can make a game with eyebleedingly good graphics but if it's terrible to play it won't sell. Mass Effect Andromeda was the best example of this. Absolutely jaw dropping graphics for the time, gameplay was like nails down a blackboard. I could even have managed to see past the terribly dull characters, contrived story, fanfic level of writing
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I don't regret the purchase really, just the price it was purchased at.
For $20, I think that'd be alright.
But the $50 or so I spent? Na- it wasn't worth that.
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I used my one free MS Gamepass trial to play it for free for 30 days. Haven't felt the need to play it again, but maybe I will in a few years when it's cheaper and (hopefully) has had some good updates.
It's pretty good, but No Man's Sky is better at the space exploration, and Borderlands is better at story/combat parts, both of which predate it.
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I do occasionally load it up just to go explore a moon and shoot some stuff up.... then I'm done with it again.
The whole thing felt like a little-bit-prettier (more... realistic?...feeling?) NMS, but without any of its good gameplay.
The loading screens really are an annoyance. Not that they last a long time, but it takes away from the game not being able to land on planets, or slowboat
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I think it still boils down to game play...how FUN is it?
Hell, to this day, one of my favorite games is the arcade version of Robotron 2084!!?!?
I can still work myself into a bad case of tennis elbow and rip the knobs off....
The graphics and sound are primitive, the game is OLD.
But it is fun.
And, whenever I go to arcade expos....I see little kids loving to play it still.
Hell, when I have friends over with kids, we often set them up on my
Graphics vs Gameplay (Score:3)
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I thought most money in starfield went to designing loading screens?
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It's the gameplay, stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
But there's a thing that can kill enjoyment of a game with the absolute best graphics, and that's crappy gameplay. Poor storytelling, bad controls, annoying mechanics. And Nintendo really understands this and puts lots of effort into the gameplay, which is why the churn out amazing games, even if they don't have the best graphics in the industry.
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but once you have decent trilinear filtering you're on the long tail part of the curve and each improvement becomes much hard for a smaller incremental improvement.
i like the sentiment but i think youre forgetting what dreamcast graphics actually looked like
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I feel like my "good enough" point was ps3 but I get what he's saying prior to dreamcast half of your brain was dedicated to suppressing the knowledge that your game looked like shit.
I can still tell the difference between a ps3 game and a new game on my gaming PC but the incremental changes are really hard to tell apart, like the difference between ps4 and ps5 is so small. My only traditional console at the moment is a WiiU and the graphics on that are ok when they wanna be and as good as they need to be
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Agreed on PS4 vs PS5 - but the biggest difference that's night and day is the loading times. Playing Spiderman 2 and being able to instant load anywhere in the city vs. the first 2 on PS4 is fantastic, but I couldn't point out anything specific in the graphics other than that the city is that much bigger. But even the "first" Spiderman 2 from back in 2004 (?) had a full city to explore and was an excellent game even on PS2. Obviously the city has "more" but I can't actually say they've improved on the co
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Yeah, I still play old games from that era - including remastered ones, all the time. They are still fun, and a simple shader treatment is all they need to make them "modern enough". Think of like Battlezone: Combat Commander, The Soul Calibur series (didn't get a remaster yet), even ps3/360 era stuff, like Darksiders, or the various Nintendo resurrections like Metroid Prime. These games looked amazing in their day, and with some simple shader updates, they look and more importantly, play amazingly today. T
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Yeah, I still play old games from that era - including remastered ones, all the time. They are still fun, and a simple shader treatment is all they need to make them "modern enough". Think of like Battlezone: Combat Commander, The Soul Calibur series (didn't get a remaster yet), even ps3/360 era stuff, like Darksiders, or the various Nintendo resurrections like Metroid Prime. These games looked amazing in their day, and with some simple shader updates, they look and more importantly, play amazingly today. The race for graphics is cool and all, but great graphics doesn't make a fun game. And Switch isn't lacking in that department - Mario Odyssey and the Zelda games look amazing, even on PC. (I do wish Nintendo would hurry up and release something capable of HDR though - from my couch, I can't tell the difference between upscaled 720p, 1080p and 4k - but I can tell the difference between HDR and SDR.)
I think that's the one area where the graphics are important, resolution.
If you're seeing obvious pixels or other artifacts at full resolution (which increases as monitors improve) then the game looks cheap and it detracts from the experience. But if it looks nice and smooth at full resolution then the game looks fine.
Nintendo goes for a cartooney style of animation and that means they look great at very high resolutions even with fairly uniform textures [reddit.com]. Nintendo can do that because their target audience o
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Personally I feel that even for PC, the graphics of 2010+ are Good Enough. Anything since then has just been extra details and more polygons, but if you make a game with even a slightly cartoony vibe to the graphics there's simply no real difference unless players are determined to meticulously investigate every single frame.
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A lot of people agree with you, considering that LoL, CS:GO, World of Tanks, Warframe etc are massive games to this day.
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Graphics do make a game more
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For me, graphics got "good enough" with the Dreamcast.
graphics affect gameplay.
ocarina of time couldnt be done on the SNES; breath of the wild couldnt be done on the N64; seamless large worlds couldnt be done on the dreamcast; softbody/fluid physics couldnt be done on the ps2; so on and so forth.
gameplay is king, but we still have a loooooong way to go with graphics.
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Hyper-agree. Especially for VR.
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Re: It's the gameplay, stupid (Score:2)
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For me, graphics got "good enough" with the Dreamcast.
That is highly dependent on what you're trying to achieve. If you're immersing yourself in the imaginary or the abstract then yes graphics were good enough back then... well almost, I'd appreciate less pixelation. But if you're immersing yourself in a hyper-real world then graphics were far from "good enough".
Graphics are an enabler for realism. It's a concept disconnected from the other factors such as gameplay and story telling. You can make a good story and good gameplay with realistic graphics too.
Yes I
Maybe they know something obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
that everybody seems to be forgetting: a good game isn't necessarily one with impressive graphics. Just like a good movie isn't necessarily one with impressive special effect: if you need convincing, watch any Marvel movie.
WIth that in mind, I mostly play SNES and Amiga games: they're great games and they provide me with great entertainment despite being utterly outclassed technically.
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that everybody seems to be forgetting: a good game isn't necessarily one with impressive graphics.
Hack, Rogue, etc ... Spent a lot of time navigating the dungeon while waiting for projects to compile/run on the VAX-11/785 (4.3BSD) in the wee hours of the night/morning at university -- way back, yes, I'm old. :-)
I'm scared to think how hungry my dog is now...
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A good game/movie they do not make, but sometimes they're a merit all their own.
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What I meant was great technical achievements make a great game or movie - or anything - even better, but shite stays shite: as the saying goes, you can't polish a turd.
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I can think of several shit games, and several more VR "things" that aren't fun, but are just visually spectacular. They are very polished turds. And they have value- even if it isn't their gameplay.
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Just like a good movie isn't necessarily one with impressive special effect: if you need convincing, watch any Marvel movie.
Funny you should mention that. One of the biggest gripes of Marvel movies is the poor visual effects of the modern churned out quickly films. Movie goers who otherwise love comic book stories complain frequently about it being very jarring to suddenly see rubbish VFX in high budget movies. And while you were saying that I just checked what the biggest block busters were: A film with cutting edge 3D graphics, followed by a Marvel film, followed by the sequel to cutting edge graphics film, followed by Titanic
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I don't disagree, but with that sentiment in mind, why release new systems at all if the old one can still play "fun games"?
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that everybody seems to be forgetting: a good game isn't necessarily one with impressive graphics. Just like a good movie isn't necessarily one with impressive special effect: if you need convincing, watch any Marvel movie.
WIth that in mind, I mostly play SNES and Amiga games: they're great games and they provide me with great entertainment despite being utterly outclassed technically.
This, and it's ultimately why Sony and Microsoft will fail by trying to create PC-like consoles. Nintendo continued to make consoles that behaved like and were priced like... erm... actual consoles. Simple, easy, casual and cheap fun. Sure the graphics weren't that good but lets face it, the Xbox/PS graphics have always played second fiddle to a mid range gaming PC that over the course of 2 years, costs less (because you don't need to pay for PSN/XBL subs, oh and cheaper games).
This is why the last conso
Duhh (Score:4, Insightful)
Nintendo does perfectly serviceable graphics with great gameplay. Keeps costs under control and let's them concentrate on the important bit: gameplay.
The odd cases where humans do things right (Score:2)
Bravo Nintendo! It's rare that corporations focus on the usefulness of their product instead of entering buzzword and benchmark wars with competitors. Investors like hearing the buzzwords, so I can see the temptation. But it's nice to see a focus on polishing what you already have paying off for a company.
Re: Duhh (Score:2)
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Nintendo does perfectly serviceable graphics with great gameplay. Keeps costs under control and let's them concentrate on the important bit: gameplay.
This is why I left PC gaming. Whoop de doo, a $400 card means less aliasing. WEEE!!!!!
Re:who said that? (Score:5, Informative)
Professional game dev. specializing in graphics here. I'm not sure why you got modded down -- you bring up some good points.
If you will excuse the length there are a few key takeaways:
1. No one said that graphics HAD to be photorealistic -- it was just that the AAA studios (indirectly) kept pushing the graphics fidelity as a marketing gimmick to stand out from their competition.
2. A portion of game developers have always been about pushing the fidelity of realism because it CAN empower a richer user experience. This required faster hardware. Quake used software rendering but required a Pentium because it was taking advantage of the overlapped Integer and Floating-point calculations in its texture mapper. The GPU was invented (specialized hardware) to free up the CPU.
> Anyone remember Origin's Strike Commander? It was slow and near unplayable even on their development machines.
Yes. Origin games were notorious for requiring demanding hardware. Sadly not too many developers understood the importance of optimizing their game -- they were too busy trying to ship the damn thing!
3. Computer graphics have literally been one approximation after another (i.e. kludge) because until recently we didn't even have the raw hardware performance to create realistic scenes. i.e. Go play the excellent Elden Ring if you want to see how draw distance is no longer an issue -- you can STILL spot the LOD (Level of Detail) transitions if you look close enough. As hardware kept getting more and more powerful, from 2D to 3D, game devs wanted more and more control over how pixels looked -- specifically how they were colored and lit.
Normal maps allowed us to have better lighting. Render-to-Texture allowed us to create all sorts of VFX such as shadow maps. Quake gave us light maps because calculating global illumination wasn't possible in real-time on the hardware at the time. Deferred Rendering was created to solve a problem of: "How do we support thousands of lights?" The tradeoff? Now you need a GPU that has the bandwidth to support a "fat" G-Buffer that is not just storing color but positions, normals, and material types. Denoisers were all the rage a few years back because console don't have the horsepower to render natively at 4K which means we need upscalers. Except now we need temporal denoising because static denoising is not enough.
Getting rid of "jaggies" means a slew of anti-aliasing algorithms were developed. MSAA, TXAA, FXAA. Every computer graphics solution has tradeoffs.
Real-Time Global Illumination (GI) and Hardware Raytracing (RT) are some of the "holy grail" of computer graphics because we can use less kludges. Some games definitely need it -- some don't. It depends on what kind of world you are creating. Tetris doesn't need GI. Does Minecraft? Nvidia thinks so with their Minecraft RTX edition. Most gamers don't care about RT.
Computer graphics quickly becomes a rabbit hole of balancing performance, cost, and stability once you leave the low poly look of the PS1 days.
Indies, knowing that they CAN'T compete on AAA graphics focus on the part that actually matters: FUN. Treating customers with respect is why Minecraft, Terraria, and Stardew Valley are HUGELY successful. They let their customers run their own servers and mod the game instead of AAA treating consumers (sic.) like a cash cow to be milked with microtransactions. AAA manipulate customers with FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) using MTX (microtransactions) and literally call their customers who can they extract the most money from whales, dolphins, and minnows -- terms from the gambling industry.
> Is this just another brainwave from the smart people in games journalism?
Gaming "journalists" (and I use the word loosely) are usually far being smart -- they are usually paid shills pushing an agenda. Polygon and Kotaku are notorious for being click-bait garbage.
> Who cares if the graphics requirements are stif
Unpopular Opinion (Score:2)
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Well, except that the cut scenes and movie level SFX from 20 years ago are done in realtime on today's $300 console. And most cut scenes are done in-engine as well, often using the same mocap setups as movies are using. So that's kind of a moving target. Would 20-30 years younger you find the current top of the line graphics equivalent to the warcraft cutscenes from the 90s or more impressive?
Style and polish (Score:5, Insightful)
Nintendo makes games fun (Score:4, Insightful)
To use a sports analogy, I would rather watch Steph Curry play then the Harlem Globetrotters. The Globetrotters are fun once in a while as a spectacle, but Curry is a real player whose fundamentals make him amazing to watch every time.
Are they games or over compensation? (Score:3)
The insecure teenage boys wanting to play pretend never controlled Nintendo's decision making. No bragging about hardware stats or realistic female rendering or adolescent emotional violence simulation... Also, being full of creatives, Nintendo has not even thought of people without any imagination who can't handle cartoons and must have total realism.
They don't loose sight on game design and do not need to compensate by lesser distractions; which is often popular tech distractions for nerds simply because
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Reasons are quite important if you want to address the causes and head it off or if you want to manufacture ways to distract and divide people.
wow (Score:2)
I always give Nintendo the benefit of the doubt (Score:2)
Back when MS and Sony were both taking huge losses on every Xbox and PS console sold, Nintendo basically took their GameCube hardware, gave it more RAM and Wiimotes, offered it at a fraction of the price of the competition, sold it at a profit, and they couldn't keep shelves stocked they were so popular.
They've swung and missed a bunch of times (Virtual Boy will always live in infamy, and they whiffed on the Wii U) but I've learned to always give them the benefit of the doubt.
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Unintended benefit (Score:3)
Nintendo cuts corners on hardware to avoid selling a console as a loss leader. Sometimes this pays benefits, such as with the Switch. In previous generations (e.g. GameCube), poor hardware/graphics has bitten them in the ass.
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Kinda--they still made a profit on it, even though sales weren't great. That's what happens when you don't sell at a loss; you can still make mistakes and recover from them. It's a solid business plan.
Over the arc of time, it's hard to claim that the decision has bitten them in the ass, even if they've often not been the most popular of the console makers.
(And FWIW, I loved my Gamecube. Lots of great games.)
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The Gamecube was hindered by limited storage, but you can't accuse it of lacking in graphical power.
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Where is this myth coming from? The Gamecube was not underpowered at the time of its release in late 2001. Games on Gamecube looked very similar to and ran at about the same performance as PS2 and XBOX games.
This is on contrast to the Wii, which *was* underpowered at the time of its release. It was literally an overclocked Gamecube with more RAM and a secondary ARM chip (to run an OS) added. You can even run Gamecube games in Wii Mode using a homebrew program called Nintendon't, it's that compatible.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/ninte... [reddit.com]
Imma just drop this here. Also Xbox had the best overall graphics capabilities of its generation. PS2 had the advantage of launching a year earlier with better third party support than GameCube. Anything else I add will be redundant to to the above link.
The Very Platonic Essence of a Bouncing Cherry (Score:4, Insightful)
Who really cares about graphics? (Score:3)
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Photorealistic graphics are style, not game (Score:3)
Pokemon is a bad example (Score:2)
Pokemon always had subpar graphics compared to other games on the same hardware, as this pic [i.redd.it] shows.
What was the point of the article? (Score:1)
"It's been raking in more than $10 billion in revenue (more than 1.6 trillion yen) annually for the past several years, and its profits have grown sharply, topping out at about $3.3 billion in the fiscal year ended March 2024."
But the problem is the graphics???? Really Manny, take your head out of your ass. This is why gamers need regular swirlies...
deathmatch or monkeyball? (Score:3)
It comes down to fun. Being engulfed in deep, realistic worlds is fun when you're alone, but when there are other people around it's a different story. I used to hang out with some friends and we'd play 1:1 deathmatch games for like 15 minutes before everyone got bored. We'd switch to Mario Kart or Monkey Ball and play for hours. I had a girlfriend who liked to play deathmatch games (Unreal, etc) but most of the women I know would rather play party games than stuff that just requires twitch abilities or following along with some epic world building story game. The people who play D&D might like that stuff, but most people are not that invested in paying attention. Mario Kart, Tetris, Mario Party, Monkey Ball are more fun with mixed doubles. If the ladies aren't having fun, nobody is.
I play the 2024 version of NETHACK on TTY (Score:2)
RDR2 (Score:2)