Comment by wat10000

> Game console updates used to be big deals. The SNES was a revolution. PS2 was huge.

There are two categories of "big deal". The SNES and PS2 were big deals simply because game graphics had so much headroom for improvement. Now that the low-hanging fruits of color palette, resolution, frame rate, texture quality, animation quality, and geometric complexity have all been squeezed, the improvements are more asymptotic.

The other "big deal" category is gimmicks. I would argue that while it is a hallmark of Nintendo, the gimmicks have flopped as often as not. Most of Nintendo's big sellers were fairly conventional. (The most glaring exceptions being the original Game Boy, the Wii, and the Switch.) I'm glad they do the gimmicks, but I'm also glad they don't only do the gimmicks.

>The SNES was a revolution

Nintendo has actually stated they view the SNES as a evolution of the NES. They have directly stated their hardware development cycle goes Revolution>Evolution>Revolution. Considering that the Switch was considered one of their revolutionary leap (their first hybrid console) it is no surprise the Switch 2 is a simple evolution of that concept. If their next console is another iteration of the Switch THEN it is safe to say they are no longer aiming to revolutionize their hardware.

Edit: After tons of searching I am starting to think that I am misremembering thing. I think this idea came about from the Wii's 'Revolution' code name and I Mandela Effected myself into think there was a interview we're either Miyamoto or Iwata talked about this being there philosophy when designing system.

> PS2 was huge

PS2 was literally just an iteration on the PS1. More powerful console, DVD instead of CD, and that was it. Nothing really new there.

Hell, the Switch 2 is more innovative than the PS2 was in terms of iteration on a previous console.

This all comes down to what the hardware improvements can mean in practice. It's not as if hardware isn't moving up, but that the new kinds of things double the hardware unlocks are much smaller than they used to be.

This is best seen on the PC market. What a gaming desktop today has running on it is, compute wise, unimaginably stronger than the best available 10-20 years ago. The increases in hardware just keep coming. But there's limits on how much more you can get out of being able to push more polygons, or to put more pixels on screen. We can do all kinds of extra photorealistic things in real time that before would have to be done only in movies, and rendered in server farms for weeks at a time. But the increased difficulty doesn't quite match how impressive the extra effects are.

You can also notice this by just playing old games, and seeing how they hold up. We can make 2d pixel art games that are much better than what a SNES could do, but many of those games still hold up just fine. Meanwhile most 3d games of the Playstation and even the PS2 era are downright painful, because the increases in power between generations back then lead to big practical differences in capability. A ps5 is much stronger than a ps4, hardware wise, but it didn't unlock much at all. All the extra power can get you cooler reflections on cyberpunk, and you can go even further with a PC that has over $1000 in video cards in it. But those reflections and atmospheric effects are eating up as much hardware as the rest of the game.

> But it’s still a little shocking to see a company lean so far into the theme of “we made incremental improvements to this thing we released 8 years ago.”

It's certainly more 'shocking' to see Nintendo do it than, say, Microsoft or Sony. But Nintendo hasn't always introduced huge new changes with a console bump — NES->SNES wasn't particularly revolutionary, and there were certainly no gimmicks there. I think it's a very understandable reaction to a) the Wii U b) the enormous success of the Switch

Hold up, what's the "revolution" between the PS1 and PS2? More processing power?

You could argue that no consoles in the Xbox or Playstation line are revolutionary, as they're the same format as the original SNES just with more buttons and processing power.

I would say the major shifts in controller type is simply a much rarer change than simple spec upgrades.

I've found more incredible improvements in AI than in consumer electronics these days. I'm still daily surprised at just how good ChatGPT is at understanding my pretty complex queries.