Nintendo comments on Switch 2’s GameChat choppiness and frame rate

One of the major features of Nintendo Switch 2 and its game screen sharing functionality, but there’s been some discussion surrounding its quality, including the frame rate. The developers of the system have now given more insight into why things appear the way they do.

Ultimately, things come down to resources. It seems the choppiness was an intentional decision to ensure that GameChat wouldn’t be taxing on the hardware so that the games themselves could take advantage of the console’s power.

Hardware director Takuhiro Dohta started off by sharing the following with GameSpot:

“In order to explain this well, I think it might first help to explain about the resources the system has. 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.”

Those aren’t the only comments we have as technical director Tetsuya Sasaki shared some words here as well. Aside from the element of resources, Nintendo wants the experience to be the same for everyone.

Sasaki stated: 

“As Nintendo, one thing we really put emphasis on is making sure that everyone experiences a very even experience when it comes to the quality of service that they’re experiencing. And based on this emphasis that we prioritize – obviously if somebody is in a better environment, they’re going to get better results in terms of their experience – but we really wanted to make sure that more than anything people had an equal or even playing field, or even experience, rather. And I think that was our priority as an entertainment company.

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.”

Sasaki added that “we’re going to see more and more titles come out.” Because of this, “we really want to make sure that reservation of space is going to them.”

Also coming from the Switch 2 developers, we now know that there won’t be an achievements system. Additionally, the Nintendo eShop won’t have music. Their comments can be found here.

Thanks to Greatsong1 for the tip.