Nintendo Switch 2 had its latest big grand unveiling last week. The folks at Nintendo took to the internet and rolled out their official Direct presentation, which was all about their new console platform. One of the big new features that the game console will come packed with is GameChat. However, did you notice the video footage looked choppy?
The showcase for GameChat offered players a chance to look at other players’ games in real-time. Outside of your own gameplay, you would have various friends on the bottom of your screen that could display their gameplay. You didn’t even need to be playing the same game, either. However, what might have distracted players was that the footage of other players’ gameplay looked incredibly choppy.
It turns out that’s how the experience will be when the Nintendo Switch 2 drops. GameChat might entice some players, but you likely won’t be using that just to view your friends’ gameplay. Speaking to GameSpot, Nintendo’s technical director, Tetsuya Sasaki, discussed the decision to limit the framerate for the gameplay footage of other players.
So obviously, chat is meant to run and work simultaneously and coincide with the game you’re playing. But we also think it’s critical that it doesn’t get in the way of the game that’s running right now. And so we wanted to definitely make sure we do was to make sure that running game chat alongside the game doesn’t result in the game experience or quality being reduced at all in any way.
So from a system resource perspective, obviously even the Nintendo Switch had a set of system resources that it needed to tap into to run the system. And now that we have Nintendo Switch 2, there is bigger, more, basically resource budget to use. However, even with that enhanced and larger budget, we try to use as little of that as possible. And they made it happen somehow. And within that small slice of the resource budget, there’s other things to take into consideration, like network systems, all that kind of stuff, and all of that taking into account is where we landed in terms of quality of the video that you saw in the footage. – Tetsuya Sasaki
Initially, Nintendo’s main focus was ensuring players didn’t become distracted by the gameplay footage. However, Tetsuya also mentioned resources. Nintendo wanted to provide enough resources for players to enjoy the game rather than use them to view other players’ gameplay footage.
And the other aspect of this is that we want to make sure that there is enough power reserved for the games themselves. And so we have a smaller area to play around in within to make sure that all these varying aspects to fit into, things like network environment connectivity. And so we landed on within this margin that we have to work within, this is a good even experience that we can provide. – Tetsuya Sasaki
They even had future game development projects in mind. There might be even more demanding games that use the system resources available in the future. So, while you won’t get the full seamless gameplay footage experience of another player in your GameChat session, Nintendo hopes it’s enough for friends to connect and help each other.
A week after the initial Nintendo Direct presentation, we’re still learning more about the console. For instance, we know that there are no planned achievements for the console. Likewise, the new Joy-Cons won’t feature the Hall effect thumbsticks. That said, the Nintendo Switch 2 is still expected to launch on June 5, 2025.
