Nintendo offers new details on Switch 2 hardware, software

<em>Mario Kart World</em> leads off a packed presentation.

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[accantant]

Looks like the new SoC has got really solid dedicated encode and decode, since they're they're presenting continuously capturing and streaming gameplay footage as basically "free" in terms of performance.

One of the presented use-cases was "GameShare", where one person can own a game and multiple people can play it remotely (like Steam's Remote Play Together and various other such services), which is pretty impressive for a handheld.

edit: In retrospect, as jg67379 pointed out, this probably wasn't actually streaming video like I assumed (especially after looking at how juddery the streams in their GameChat example were), but just sharing (partial) copies of the game, like the old DS one-card multiplayer.

 

[accantant]

I think the GameShare is more like the Steam family sharing feature. It's not actually streaming the game from another console

It's explained in this article: https://meincmagazine.com/gaming/2025...m-for-sharing-digital-switch-games-explained/

Or like the DS's one-card multiplayer
Yeah, you're probably right, it was pretty shortly after the other game streaming+chat stuff so I assumed, but they never explicitly said. And the streams using GameChat were pretty juddery, looking at the video now.

 

[accantant]

Weird, they have a Japanese-accounts-only, Japanese-language-only SKU that's much cheaper (69,980¥ vs 49,980¥, or $468 vs $335). I always game in English, but it's an enticing offer tbh…

A pleasant surprise is how preorders from Nintendo Store will work: you need an account with >50h of gaming time and >1 year of Nintendo Online subscription to apply to the preorder lottery. Should minimize scalping quite a bit.

Seems to be a crowbar solution to the issue of the JPY being so weak right now, I guess we've got an answer to this article's questions: https://meincmagazine.com/gaming/2025/02/will-japans-weak-enconomy-mean-a-cheaper-switch-2-in-the-us/

 

[accantant]

BTW how does VAT work? I've been wondering the past couple weeks if it's similar to if the US had a flat 20% tariff on everything from everywhere, and that 20% was passed on 1:1 to the consumer?

Most (all?) EU country prices include that country's (and that product category's) VAT in the sticker price.

The Switch 2 is a luxury (or standard, depending on the country's rate categories) good, so its VAT will be around 20% depending on the country. (Some go as high as 27%, some as low as 8.1%. My country does 21% and Germany does 19%.)

 

[accantant]

Yeah, VAT is equivalent to our state/local sales tax.

Except

1) It’s constant across the EU instead of skewing the markets by people being able to go buy things cheaper in nearby jurisdictions, and meaning online merchants don’t need expensive systems for managing calculation/collection for different jurisdictions.

No, it's not. Each country has its own VAT rates.

When I buy something from Amazon in Germany, it removes its German VAT and applies my (higher) VAT from the Netherlands.

Here's a site with all the rates in one go: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/value-added-tax-vat-rates-europe/

 

[accantant]

Didn’t watch the presentation, will probably skim it later. I’ll be waiting an extra year or two to pick up some white or special edition version of the console, but wow am I surprised to hear about a FROM Software exclusive. Given that nobody above is buzzing about this, I’m guessing it wasn’t given much airtime in the reveal?

Duskbloods + the usual Metroid/Zelda/Mario stuff would normally make this a day 1 system seller purchase, if not for the fact I still have a large backlog of top-shelf games that include finishing the vanilla Elden Ring experience, base Cyberpunk, Witcher 3, and around a dozen or so Switch games still sitting in their shrink wrap.

Maybe I’ll get around to finishing most of those before Playstation 7 and Switch 4.

The FromSoft reveal was a pretty long trailer, but it was towards the end (and well after the Elden Ring port reveal, for some reason).

I'm kinda excited about it, but I'm also very worried that we'll have another cool FromSoft title trapped on an underpowered console forever.

edit: Weirdly, the reveal that so many games are using Mouse Mode was probably the most exciting to me, especially Metroid Prime 4. Having a mouse as part of the system opens up a lot of interesting ports/games, and I never plan to play an FPS with a controller again.

That said, I'll almost certainly wait, too. Either for a decent sale (and after games come down from the ridiculous prices Nintendo suggests) or the OLED edition.

 

[accantant]

To explicate this part, as I understand it: Only the final customer is responsible for the VAT, so at every intermediate step in production the business takes a tax credit to offset the tax they're paying.

This means there's no good way to cheat, because every firm is filing paperwork about every link in the production chain.

(Perhaps not important for a product manufactured abroad, but interesting!)

Basically, yeah.
When I buy something through my company, I don't pay VAT up front. That business transfers the responsibility to pay VAT to me (they include this in their tax statements), essentially deducting it from their own taxes.
If I bought goods with VAT included and use them for my business, I'll register the VAT separately.
Then, when I sell something to a non-business customer, I offset the price I want to charge with the VAT over that full price. (Often fudging with that non-VAT price a bit to get a nicer-looking with-VAT price.)

And at the end of the quarter, I pay VAT over my income (before expenses, and including that offset price from earlier), minus any VAT I paid earlier, and in doing so, cover the VAT for the other companies I bought things from.
If I somehow didn't have any income, I still have to pay all VAT from the businesses that transferred that responsibility to me.* But this is deducted from my VAT next time I do have an income. (And there's ways to delay payment if I were in really dire straits.)

(There's more complicated scenarios when dealing with different VAT rate categories, or having paid VAT for something in a different country, or buying something that's not fully for business use, or something where VAT is spread over/offset to different periods, but that's the gist of it.)

*And if I bought a bunch of things through my company but don't pay any VAT, despite those other companies having offset the responsibility to me, I'm the one who gets in trouble. (Likewise, if a company claims to pay VAT over something I buy but doesn't, I can still deduct that VAT from my VAT payment, and the company that didn't pay VAT gets in trouble.)