On October 20, 2016, Nintendo released the first trailer for its new console. The general public, which had previously been fed by rumors, patent applications and leaks, first saw the face of a future device. But that was all. Neither the exact date of release (somewhere in March of the next year), nor technical characteristics, nor the price was given to us.

Trailer

It is noticeable that in the trailer there are only people of the same age group, which in the USA are called “ millennials ”. These are young people who were born around the period of the mid-nineties - the beginning of zero. They are 15-25 years old. For comparison: Revolution , the first video about Wii, included much more age groups. There were even older people.

In the video, people instead of resting from the games and enjoying the surrounding nature while walking with a pet, continue to stare at the screen, but already on the go. They play in any kind of transport: from taxi to planes. The tiny screen and controllers are great for multiplayer when shaken in the back of a minivan. Neighbors invite Karen to a drunk on the roof, and she drags her strange console there.
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A tweet and a short video - that's all there was, but the media took them well. According to ICO Partners , more was written about the Switch announcement than about the Xbox Scorpio and the PlayStation 4 Pro.

Screen

Nothing was called, even the screen diagonal. Journalists with Ars Technica figured it out, taking the analog stick diameter at 17.5 millimeters and carefully measuring the promotional images. It turned out that the screen has a diagonal of 6.5 inches.



Estimation not far away from subsequent leaks. Eurogamer claims that the console screen has a diagonal of 6.2 inches (15.75 cm). Its resolution is 720p. The number of horizontal pixels is unknown. Judging by the promotional images, the aspect ratio of the screen is 16: 9. Hence its resolution is 1280 × 720 , 237 pixels per inch. This is higher than the 6.2-inch screen gamepad Wii U GamePad - 854 × 480 pixels.

Modern smartphones have spoiled us with the clarity of the screens. The flagship 6.2-inch phablet buyer expects a resolution of 2560 × 1440, four times clearer assumptions about the Switch. On the other hand, the additional pixels and graphics calculations for them are lost battery hours. Probably, for a gaming device, working from one charge is more important.

Leakage claims that, like any smartphone, the capacitive Switch screen takes ten touches. In the trailer this is not demonstrated. Perhaps because in three minutes it was necessary to cram the concept of hybridity and detachable controllers. The screens of the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U are equipped with a one-touch resistive pressure-sensitive touchscreen.

It is not known whether the touch functions will be the main ones: in the form connected to the TV, the tablet screen is blocked by the docking station case. An infrared sensor is built into the right JoyCon. Perhaps they will somehow be able to interact with the television screen.

Filling

The processor and Switch "graphics" are in a tablet-like part. Dock needed to recharge and connect to the TV. (The situation is the opposite of Wii U: in those games where you can play from the screen of the gamepad, the dock-box should be near to transfer the picture.)

The computational power of the processor and graphics accelerator cannot be estimated from the screenshots of the games presented. What was shown in the trailer is a game of actors with equipment mock-ups. Games added already in post-production. As one of the actors said - Dickhiskhan Twitch-streamer - the movie was filmed in mid-September in high secrecy. For example, the actors recognized the name of the console just before the shooting: at the rehearsals the inscriptions on the layouts were sealed with black tape.

However, artificiality is noticeable as well: in one of the frames, the image on the device screen with an angle overlaps Karen's hand. There is nothing to be angry about: the video honestly warns: “Game footage not final, graphics and features subject to change”. It scares a little that five months before the release a props are needed, and there are no exclusives yet.



On the technology inside the console, said another company - Nvidia. The switch will put the chip line Tegra. This is a system on a chip with an Nvidia video accelerator and several ARM cores (or their modifications Nvidia Denver).

Last year, the Shield Android TV came out on Tegra X1, 512 gigaflops of which was enough to launch Crysis 3 at 30 frames per second. The console could play 4K content at 60 frames per second and focused on streaming, but was generally able to play old desktop toys.

All this made a tablet chip heat generation of 10-15 watts. According to the manufacturer, the 20-watt console with a 20-nm process technology chip reached 512 gigaflops performance. Probably, the future Nvidia microcircuit on the 16-nm FinFet + process technology can easily give a tiny tablet a lot more computing power than the Wii U has ( 352 gigaflops , 35-75 watts, 45 nm process technology).


So in the world of the future looks like a game controller for multiplayer. By the way, in official materials the name Joy-Con has the same singular and plural form.

The Wii U has a PowerPC architecture processor and a video accelerator from AMD. About backward compatibility with physical drives of past generations is out of the question: as shown in the trailer, the Switch is powered by some kind of cartridges. Nintendo confirmed the lack of backward physical compatibility with 3DS and Wii U in comments to Famitsu magazine. About regional restrictions while it is not known.

Price, or what Nintendo can afford

One of the success factors of any console is its affordability for the consumer. You can sell the game console itself at a loss, and earn money by licensing games for it and creating your own. So it was, for example, with the Wii U at the start. But the head of Nintendo said that he would not sell the Switch below its cost.


The previous Nintendo console positioned itself as a cheaper option with a price tag of $ 300 and $ 350. At the time of launch, the price of the Wii U was at the level of the slim-versions of the previous generation of consoles that are living out their age. Those who replaced the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One started at $ 400, although they went down to 250-300 dollars later. It is unlikely that Nintendo will decide to ask for a hybrid console with a minimum set of peripherals more than two hundred or three hundred dollars.

Nintendo's financial statements indicate that Wii U sales are falling. Over the past six months, sales of the game console sank by 53% to 560 thousand devices, games for it were sold by 33% less, 8.3 million units. This year for the console did not come out a killer application that would interest buyers, complains financial report. Nintendo lowered its revenue forecast for this year from an initial $ 431 million to $ 287 million. Due to the sale of a stake in the Seattle Mariners baseball club and the success of Pokemon Go (Nintendo owns part of the Pokemon Company), revenues for the same period last year increased from $ 109.2 million to $ 365.8 million.

Nintendo is a Japanese company, and in Japan the fiscal year ends March 31. Therefore, Switch sales will have little effect on Nintendo’s final financial statements for this fiscal year. According to current plans, until the end of the fiscal year (that is, until the end of March 2017, less than a month after launch), Nintendo hopes to sell 2 million devices.

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The latest Wii U will be made this Friday. Since November 2012, about 13 million Wii U have been sold. For Nintendo, this is unusually small: buyers purchased 101 million Wii , 21 million GameCube and 32 million Nintendo 64 . In March, Nikkei analysts predicted that Wii U would shut down production by the end of this year, but Nintendo still denied everything and pointed out plans to continue production. You can see why the Wii U is leaving: sales are falling, and companies need to focus on the Switch.


The price, features and release date of the Switch will be given to us on January 12, 2017 . The selected date does not conveniently interfere with the announcements of the exhibition CES 2017, which will be held from 5 to 8 January. Since the announcement was made by both the Japanese and the American divisions, the presentation will likely be broadcast on the web in Japanese and English, much like Nintendo Direct does. The Japanese division mentions some events in Tokyo on January 14 and 15.

So, more data will be given to us on January 12, and before that - not a bit more .