Among the key features of the Nintendo Switch 2 that was unveiled during last week’s Direct was GameChat. Accessed through the new C button on the Switch 2’s new controllers, GameChat will allow players to communicate online through voice, video, and even livestreams of their gameplay. However, it was worth noting that the livestreams of games through GameChat were of quite low resolution.
Speaking to GameSpot, Switch 2 hardware director Takuhiro Dohta and technical director Tetsuya Sasaki spoke about how technical limitations led to the games streamed through GameChat would be at a lower resolution than one would expect in a world with livestreams on YouTube, Twitch, and even Discord.
According to Dohta, it all comes down to how the Switch 2’s hardware capabilities were allocated between the different software it would run. This means that, while GameChat has been developed to run alongside games with all of its features, Nintendo didn’t want more resource-intensive features like game streaming to cause degradations to the gameplay experience of the player.
“In order to explain this well, I think it might first help to explain about the resources the system has,” said Dohta. “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.”
Sasaki also emphasised the idea of Nintendo wanting to make sure that a player’s experience in actually playing a game while using GameChat shouldn’t be compromised. This means that games need to have the right amount of power dedicated to running them in the console.
“And the other aspect of this is that we want to make sure that there is enough power reserved for the games themselves,” explained Sasaki. “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.”