Comment by koromak 2 days ago
I just hope its powerful enough that Indies can target it along with the Steam Deck, rather than just hope an pray like they did for Switch 1's late lifecycle. The amount of <30fps indie titles on there was sad.
Kind of by definition indies don’t have the resources to optimize their games as much as a major studio.
Man that's 100% on the indie dev. Most people don't buy indie games for cutting-edge graphics. You start pushing the envelope, you get what you get.
The Switch was weak when it came out. Decent PCs from that same year can handle most of these games just fine. It's not really the developer's fault when the Switch is the only platform with issues, and they're usually not "pushing the envelope" in any way. The fault here is Nintendo's, they didn't prioritize support for ported games, though admittedly they couldn't really foresee the indie game boom, since it wasn't nearly as big of a deal at the time, especially in Japan.
First-party Nintendo titles are more or less the only games that actually manage to "push the envelope" on the Switch, and that's because they have the resources and experience to do it. Even then, some games end up constrained compared to the original vision, because the hardware can't handle it no matter how much insider knowledge you have about how it works and how to use it right.
Thanks to the success of The Witcher 3, I wouldn't call CDPR an indie dev anymore. I'm sure porting that game wasn't easy, but it had a well resourced studio behind it. Not all games can even make the tradeoffs that were necessary for it to work, though. Factorio, a 2D game, also made by a pretty competent but still indie developer, was ported to the Switch, but its expansion pack Space Age couldn't be.
What a bizarre thing to say. People buy indie games for all sorts of different reasons, and sometimes it's the beautiful art style.
"Beautiful art style" and "cutting-edge graphics" are nowhere near synonymous. They are orthogonally related at best (and many people would even argue that they are opposing goals).
Unity's fault?
Unity also kinda killed playing indie games on a laptop (at least on battery) on x86...