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The headline is click bait. I would only judge the launch as “not gone well” when the system fails to sell.

Addressing a couple of the points they made in the article:

The announced price is more than people expected, but day 1 buyers are probably die hard fans and influencers, who would buy it anyway, at double the price. The real test is going to be the holidays and how the price looks side by side with rivals. Based on the news from Microsoft, the Nintendo prices will be in line with the competition. Also, if price does cause issues, Nintendo may get a “free” price drop in the US when Trump drops tariffs (consumers pay less but Nintendo maintains their margins).

Having retailer pre-order systems fail under the Switch 2 load is not Nintendo’s fault. If anything, it shows that the system will sell well initially. Also, they are not losing sales if consumers get a website crash instead of “sold out”.

And the GameBoy and GameBoy Advance or the DS and 3DS. All the follow ups fail to live up to the heights of the predecessor, but not all failures.

So it may be worth $10 for some people, then. I am fine with a cheaper game with slightly worse graphics. I am not sure I even notice if a game is running at 60 fps or 30 fps. Even when a game dips below 30, I notice it getting a bit choppy, but a game should be engaging enough that I will not pay it any attention.

Not really. People on Lemmy are paranoid. Not saying that corporations are not assholes looking to maximize how much of your money they are getting but they are not out to hurt you. Believe it or not, corporations actually want consumers to like them. Most corporate actions are not evil, they are caused by workers being lazy and cutting corners.

What seems more likely? Nintendo testing remote bricking of systems on customers instead of QA or Nintendo OS developers not having firmware ready by the time manufacturing started (and IT scrambling last minute to bring up update servers in time for launch).

Isn’t it rumored that Nintendo has been manufacturing Switch 2 hardware for years? Those early manufactured consoles are not going to have a fully functional OS. Makes sense that they have a basic firmware that can connect to the update servers and fetch the released OS once it is available.

Are they getting ahead of a leak?

They know that someone is about to spoil the release date, so they quickly throw together a tweet to control the message and buy time for a more comprehensive and thought out announcement as part of the Nintendo Direct.

According to the article, the upgrade will get you “a higher resolution and improved framerates.”

For me, that upgrade is not worth it. I will play the game entirely in portable mode and my vision is not what it used to be, so I don’t care about resolution.

I don’t want to sync my bookmarks. The sites I want bookmarked on my desktop are not the same as the sites I want bookmarked on my phone nor the sites I want bookmarked on my work laptop.

As an occasional user, I am sad to see it go. Are there any other sites out there to maintain a list of links that I may find useful in the future? With a web UI and not self hosted?

Do other games need a major performance patch?

Isn’t Steam even more always online?

Yes, I also think physical releases are best (at least for how I play games).

That has nothing to do with anything. I am specifically talking about digital copies. Last I checked, I could not take a digital 3DS purchase I made and give it to a friend to play on their system.

The (only) advantage of Game Carts over digital is that you can resell them and lend them to people outside of your (digital) family.

Do you have a source for Nintendo only having one cart size? I have heard people saying that Nintendo does offer multiple cart sizes, but they are all (relatively) expensive.

This to me feels like Nintendo wants a stronger grip on digital key redistributions by adding a physical element into it to screw over key and account resellers. People are much less likely to sell a physical item when compared to a fully digital one.

From what I have heard, every first party Nintendo game is coming out with a game-on-cartridge release while most third party games are key carts.

My take on the situation is that publishers complained about the cost of large capacity Switch 2 cartridges, so Nintendo created Game Key carts for them to use. Once they existed for large size games, why would a publisher not use them for all games? Complaints from a vocal minority that buys the game anyways?

Nintendo expects to sell another 4.5 million Switch 1 consoles during this fiscal year (April '25 through March '26), so they are confident that they will beat the DS.

Note, that data is from April 8th, which is before the 90 day tariff pause was announced.

From what my friends working in retail have told me, the trend is (temporarily) reversed. Every freight container going to the US is getting booked solid at inflated rates as brands try to bring in merchandise from non-Chinese factories into the US in case the tariffs resume.