> It really makes me think Nintendo has an untapped market here to sell a little box you plug into your PC that plays switch games, interfaces with their controllers, etc. They've done oddball stuff like the SNES Gameboy player and GameCube GBA player add-ons in the past, it feels like there would be people willing to pay to properly play Switch games on their gaming PCs.
It seems unlikely they would be willing to let go of control like that. With all their oddball stuff, you were still largely within the Nintendo ecosystem. They also probably don't want to deal with the piracy problem on PC, considering they already deal with it on their relatively locked-down consoles.
For better or for worse, Nintendo also likes to really control the experience you get playing games on their platforms; It would probably not be a great look for them to have to deal with thousands of customers that are trying to run their games on hardware older than a Switch and complaining that it's a terrible experience. Yeah the existing hardware is underpowered, but its uniformly underpowered, and that's worth quite a bit too.
I think for Nintendo, the more prudent solution would be to release an updated Switch with some more powerful hardware that's fully backwards compatible with the existing Switch library. It would be very par for the course for them, and assuage most of the complaints about the Switch being underpowered.
It seems unlikely they would be willing to let go of control like that. With all their oddball stuff, you were still largely within the Nintendo ecosystem. They also probably don't want to deal with the piracy problem on PC, considering they already deal with it on their relatively locked-down consoles.
For better or for worse, Nintendo also likes to really control the experience you get playing games on their platforms; It would probably not be a great look for them to have to deal with thousands of customers that are trying to run their games on hardware older than a Switch and complaining that it's a terrible experience. Yeah the existing hardware is underpowered, but its uniformly underpowered, and that's worth quite a bit too.
I think for Nintendo, the more prudent solution would be to release an updated Switch with some more powerful hardware that's fully backwards compatible with the existing Switch library. It would be very par for the course for them, and assuage most of the complaints about the Switch being underpowered.