But that's what I'm saying anything standard made for unreal 5 is going to be mostly beyond the Switch's capacity. Once the Xbox and PS5 are out for a few years it's going to be a real effort to lower the performance that much to fit it on the switch, especially when it comes to lighting since everything is now being coupled with raytracing. You can only bake so much shit in before it winds up being less of a port and more of a de-make.
Dragon Quest 11-S's downgrade from the original is pretty noticeable on other hardware for example. Phones are the lower barrier of entry but they also improve the most because they get replaced every year.
What will happen is games will be made for PS5/Xbox in mind then down ported to whatever Nintendo console is around then, will have a lot of cutbacks, could turn out good like DQ11s, to playable like Spyro or to shit like DbD switch ports. Most of these will likely be a late port, not impacting the development of the normal game.
They could forgo the porting, and just make the game streaming only for it, such games like Control and the upcoming GotG game have already done so.
Make the game with the switch in mind then port it for the other consoles. For smaller games or JRPG who the biggest market is on Nintendo, this makes sense,
Also, DQ11-S is pretty well done and had that been the original version I doubt people would have had issues with the DQ11s port to PS4/XBone/PC, with that said not saying the fact those consoles got the downgrade graphics is fine, just saying if we were unaware of it, people would have been fine with how it looks.
Anyway, if you are talking about the switch or switch 2 holding back next gen consoles, I disagree will be the Xbox Series S that does that if anything
Sony has bought some smaller studios and Insomniac, and Nintendo acquired Next Level Games, but I'd hardly call those on the same level of what Xbox Game Studios is doing. Those additions are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, especially since those studios were already developing exclusively for the companies that acquired them.
That money will be spread around the entire company, not just SIE. Its nothing compared to the literal billions Microsoft is throwing at Xbox. I'll put it this way; we won't see a major acquisition of a large third party developer by Sony like we saw with Microsoft. Maybe smaller strategic acquisitions, but nothing that will get people's attention or massively expand their current capacity.
Compared to M,S what Sony is doing is smaller, but not because they don't want to spend the money or have the money but because like I explained it doesn't fit with their plan. Sony wants to make more AAA hit that sells 10 million-plus units and moves consoles, so the studio they buy is for that goal, a Ubisoft or Square Enix wouldn't help that goal but working with smaller studio/new studios to make new games in the mould and buying them if they the games does well, does make sense.
What's XBox is doing is to sell Gamepass which they need a lot of already made games, not much downtime between new first-party games and well know ips/dev studios for, it's why MS has not only bought a big studio like Bethesda but also Double Fine which puts out smaller games. It's one of the reasons many of their upcoming bigger games also have MP of some sort, to keep people on game pass and keep engagement high. It's also why MS has been big on BC, more content for Gamepass.
It's nothing to do with the size of the wallets, just different plans with both making sense. But even half that $18.3 billion, would have covered pretty much all the devs/publishers MS has bought in the past few years. Unless MS buys Activision or Nintendo. Sony could do the same, just makes no business sense right now to do so, their games are very profitable.
