Game Theory - Nintendo's SECRET Plan For The Switch!

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

Join former Game Theory Host MatPat as he EXPOSES the real reason Nintendo is releasing the Switch!

It's the Nintendo Switch presentation, but every time you hear a snap, it's a game theory about the Nintendo Switch. Well, darn, that was fast. Oh, internet, welcome to Game Theory, where, let's be honest, someone from the Nintendo marketing team clearly misread his emails and thought it was the Nintendo Snap. Switch, not Snap. Anyway, we've been talking a whole lot about Undertale lately, so this week we're finally gonna switch it up. Don't worry, that's about the only switch pun that I have up my sleeve. so don't switch to another video. Alright, that one was weak.

Now, if everything goes according to plan, by the time this video releases, the Nintendo's Switch should be just about ready to come out. Unless, of course, the editor team decided to rebel on me again. You stay in the basement. Back! Back, you monsters! Back to the editing basement with you! Hoo! But just based on what we've seen so far,

early feelings from fans, cynics, and developers about the Switch have been mixed. And no, not just because it throws another monkey wrench into Mario's cannon height all over again. What the heck, Nintendo? We just, we just accepted him as 5 foot 1 inches tall. But if that's the case, that means that the humans in Super Mario Odyssey are almost 10 feet tall. 10 feet! Seriously! Do you think these guys are as tall as Mario? I think not.

Also, also, if this game's version of New York City is populated by creatures this tall, and Mario is this tall, they're not the same creature! They're not both humans! So what does that make Mario? What does that make these guys? I don't know! Are the aliens? One of them has to be! Oh!

Being a theorist is so infuriating sometimes! Alright, rantover. I'm just gonna have to accept that Mario has no discernible candidate. Or that Super Mario Odyssey's version of New York is populated by actual giants. Let's just hope it's better than Crisis City. Balls in your court, Nintendo. From the brilliant minds behind Sonic 06 comes Super Mario 17. 10 years later, still 10 feet tall. But enough about Mario's height, because seriously, if there's one topic I've talked to death, it's fnaf.

But if there's a second topic I've talked to death, it's Mario's height. No, today I'm switching my focus to the system itself. Because the switch is a bit of an oddball, right? It's kind of portable, but it's also kind of big. It's a new system, but with graphics that aren't really aiming to compete with the other two heavy hitter consoles. And it's got these really crazy controllers that are really awesome from a technical standpoint. I mean, you can literally feel virtual balls rolling around in your hand, uh, not in a sexual way. But at the same time, who's gonna develop for these things? It's part Wii, part Wii U, part DS, part original NES? So what's Nintendo's angle here?

Well, I have a theory that Nintendo has a secret strategy with the Switch. One that I don't think anyone sees coming, but one that, if done right, could offer us experiences like no other gaming console has done before. Now, Nintendo, for all their faults, hasn't made their name by following trends. Rather, they're far more comfortable setting the trends, for better or worse. It was the start of their whole big Switch presentation. The Wii's motion controls is the sole reason that this ping-pong ball glued to a little lightsaber exists. Shoulder buttons originated on the super Nintendo controller and the GameCube had a handle. We put a handle on Nintendo GameCube so it could be carried around.

Fast forward to today and the technology that got me researching this theory in the first place. Because while everyone else is focused on gluing laptop clickpads to their controllers, Nintendo releases these, the Joycons. Weird little handheld controllers packaged in two OCD infuriating colors. I am NOT gonna go off on a tangent about that too! But what's interesting about the controllers is that while they may be awkward to look at, they go back to the roots of what made Nintendo successful in the 21st century. Motion controls and haptic feedback. When you attach a strap to the controllers, it basically becomes a motion control Wii mode on steroids.

The things have an HD rumble. The ability to mimic the tactile feel of just about anything, but doesn't mean a whole lot until you actually experience them. So let me give you an example. In the minigame 1-2 switch, which is basically this system's tech demo, one of the mini-games requires you to guess the number of a match Marbles that are rolling around inside an imaginary box just by moving the controller around in your hand and the feeling is unbelievable You seriously feel one by one balls rolling and bouncing around inside of a box that doesn't exist hitting each other rolling on top of each other It is that detailed and while it is super cool from a tech perspective. I wondered what the point of it was from a gaming perspective Because you think the next call of duty is gonna be including the HD feel of slitting a person Throne into its next game and usually when it comes to these weird tech features Nintendo is leading the way with its first-party titles but how does something like that fit into a platformer game like Mario Odyssey?

For the HD Rumble to really mean anything it means that you're gonna have to be using these joycons unattached like a weemote or more accurately like the HTC Vive the Oculus touch or any of the other VR headsets with hand controls Only these are gonna be one step up because they're able to mimic the objects you're holding in the virtual world My suspicion was further supported by president of Nintendo Tatsumi Kimishima who said in an interview that they were quote Studying the feasibility of virtual reality in the switch. So does that mean the switch is Nintendo's second toe in the VR market after the resounding success of the virtual boy? Is that the big theory here? Well, there's more to it than that after more digging I was able to find that Nintendo has secured a patent for a headset mount designed for virtual reality purposes, a head mount that looks suspiciously like the one Samsung and Google are currently selling. The gear and the daydream, which allows you to slot in your phone and make it into a virtual reality device.

A portable phone that switches into a VR headset. Kind of sounds like a portable gaming device slightly larger than a phone that switches into a VR headset. Hmm. And not only that, look deeper into the patent and you'll find, quote, In the present embodiment, the controllers 3 and 4 may be used while they're removed from the main unit 2. Therefore, even with the main unit two attached to the HMD accessory 230, the controllers 3 and 4 can be used as controller devices. That is, a user can operate the controllers using the hands, while the HMD accessory 230 with the main unit 2 attached there too is mounted on the head of the user. And here you thought that textbook sucked to read.

It's like all the worst parts of a math problem coupled with a legal contract. But if you actually go back through and translate what that gobbledygook means in English, it basically confirms that the JoyCon have, in part, been designed to operate like handsets while the device is sitting right in front of your eyes, just like any of the other VR devices on the market today. I also noted in the patent that it mentions the main unit has an acceleration and velocity sensor for changing a visual perspective that's being shown on the screen. i.e. the motion that you're seeing on screen is directly related to the movement of your head, just like a VR headset. In other words, everything about the switch says that it's not just aiming to take over as both your at-home game and your preferred portable gaming experience, but it's also looking to compete with literally everyone from Facebook to Google to Sony and Samsung in the VR space.

And at $300 plus whatever that little strap is gonna cost, they're gonna be doing it at a much cheaper price than anyone else on the market. Even the phone headset hybrids, which is pretty darn smart. So is that it? Is the theory here that Nintendo is tricking you into buying your first VR console? Get you to buy a Switch to play Breath of the Wild, but in the process get you one step close to a cool new VR experience? I think that's part of it, but we're not done. Because I think Nintendo is also moving to take over a region of gaming mostly ignored by their rival console developers,

augmented reality. Where virtual reality is all about creating an entirely new universe for you to look into, augmented reality is about injecting the real world with more interesting stuff. Right now, augmented reality is most successful in the form of, of all places, Snapchat filters, which can do anything from turn me into a cute dog, to a cute member of Kiss, a cute kawai girl. Now that I look at it, my natural calling.

By the power of the moon, I shall punish you. Huh? And Nintendo is no stranger to this technology or how popular it can get. One of the major selling points of the 3DS was its ability to create augmented reality games. And one of the largest trending blowouts of mobile gaming last year,

and Nintendo's biggest stock jump price in years, came from Pokemon Go, which netted over $300 million in the first few months, and allowed you to catch Pokemon in real life through augmented reality delivered to you via a small portable screen as you walked around. And now Nintendo is getting ready to release the switch A console whose biggest selling feature is a small portable screen that allows you to walk around The ability to play while you're out and about. Coincidence? I think not And it's that screen that ultimately pushes me away from saying that they're banking solely on the switch as a VR system

At this point Nintendo is pretty darn comfortable being the scrawny kid at the beach party off on his own sandbar watching the bonfire but able to offer a great time if you ask because while Microsoft and Sony tend to focus on raw power Nintendo goes in a different direction and apparently doesn't care about having the fastest car as long as they can deliver a good experience to the user but virtual reality is different people take for granted how super demanding virtual reality is on systems decent VR usually runs at 90 or more frames per second and really really low latency in order to minimize the amount of vomit decorating people's homes the switch itself doesn't really seem like it can handle

that kind of load especially since it sports a 7 120p screen when basically every phone on the market has 1080p screens and true virtual reality headsets have two 1080p screens literally twice the average HD monitors worth of pixels and four times the pixels the switch is sporting but you know what's less demanding on smaller systems augmented reality after all the huge success of Pokemon Go was that it could work on almost any phone on the market funny enough it turns out that it takes way way less powerful hardware and fancy nonsense to project stuff into the world around you heck even the 3DS could do it. But Manpat, I hear you saying in your deep sensual raspy voice,

augmented reality requires input from the outside world, like the cameras in a phone that allow the image to project onto the screen. The switch doesn't have any cameras. Theory busted. And yeah, you're absolutely right about that, except for two things. One, the joycon are easy to switch out. So if an AR game suddenly needed it, you could release a joycon with built-in camera. It's an easy fix, just release a peripheral or pack it in with the game itself. But here's the other thing, the Switch already has a pretty sophisticated camera hidden in it. It's in a weird place too. It's in the bottom of the right joycon. It's a motion depth infrared camera, which Nintendo has stated can differentiate between different handshapes, like rock, paper, and scissors.

The tracker will also be able to detect how far an object is from the controller, but it's not just a simple shape-sensing camera. In fact, looking at more of the switch patents, we see that they're toying around with functionality that included projecting an image or color onto a player's hand, detecting what the player was holding and things like throwing a virtual baseball projected onto a hand back into the game. And get this, Nintendo says that this magic camera is gonna be able to record full video sometime in the future, i.e. that it's already able to sense the outside world and suck that back into the switch for you to play AR games. So you couple that level of sensory technology with HD rumble controllers and a device that can literally give you a magic window into an augmented reality,

and you have yourself a console that truly offers everything. Console, handheld, VR, and AR. Unlike everyone else who is currently building separate devices for every single purpose, Nintendo in one fell swoop would have created one system that is truly all in one for all of the different ways that people will be able to game in the near future. And that truly would be switching it up. We just didn't see it because we were too distracted by the Splatoon guy doing the double dab. Dab like nobody's watching.

But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.