PlayStation vs. Nintendo 5.0
Old rivalry lives through the online gaming era.
As tech journalist Jeremy Laird predicted seven years ago (https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/moores-law-and-the-golden-age-of-pc-gaming), the golden age of PC gaming, as well as gaming in general, seems to have come. Steam became a full-fledged universal platform for tens of millions of gamers worldwide, covering 75% of market share in the PC gaming space. Although the “Death of Moore’s law” is still being murmured, processing power of gaming PCs and traditional game consoles have kept improving at an impressive pace. For example, the new PlayStation 5 boasts 10.3 TFLOPs compared to its predecessor PlayStation 4’s 1.84 TFLOPs. High-definition games with massive open world settings are now affordable with both gaming PCs and consoles.
Despite all the inflation in processing power, I’d like to highlight an alternative strategy that lives on; one that trades off some computing power and display quality with user experience. As you might expect, I’m talking about Nintendo, the savvy rival of Sony’s PlayStation since its debut in 1994. I would like to pick some features of Nintendo’s most recent console Nintendo Switch to demonstrate that the actual “fun” gamers appreciate might not rely solely on computing muscle, but rather on holistic gaming experience.
Collaborating with NVIDIA, Nintendo placed custom Tegra chips at the heart of Switch. However, even borrowing GPU power of NVIDIA, Switch’s computing power is 1 TFLOP; below the 1.84 TFLOPs of PlayStation 4 equipped with AMD chips. Moreover, Switch has only 4GB of RAM, half of PS4’s capacity. Display quality is also better in PS4 which is capable of 1080p resolution as well as high-dynamic range (HDR), compared to Switch where some games sink below 720p resolution.
However, Nintendo has done remarkably well with this inferior piece of hardware. Switch is on pace to eclipse the lifetime sales of PS4, which had dominated the game console market for years. Sony has been defeated by Nintendo when it discontinued its mobile game console business with PlayStation Vita, which was effectively kicked out of market by the advent of the two-way game console Switch. Furthermore, since the previous generation Wii and DS Lite, Nintendo succeeded in expanding the gaming population from children and young male adults to all generations including women. The company is further cultivating this broad customer base by unique extensions such as Nintendo Labo; paper crafts that could be combined with Switch.
Behind the success of Nintendo’s strategy to differentiate with lower spec hardware is the company’s calm observation of a shrinking pool of traditional gamers and a rise of PC gaming, Smartphone games and other forms of comparable entertainment. By conceding victory in the core gaming market to Sony, Nintendo secured a sustainable position in a rapidly changing market.
On the other hand, Nintendo is reportedly preparing a high-end version of Switch with a larger Samsung OLED and support for 4K gaming (https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/320546-new-nintendo-switch-with-larger-samsung-oled-rumored-for-this-year). Higher resolution will require more computing power, which means more powerful chips than the current NVIDIA Tegra chips. Even if Nintendo refuses an arms race in processing power with Sony, it still has to keep abreast of the times. Thus, the long battle between PlayStation and Nintendo continues into the new era of online gaming where computing power is pulled to its limit.
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