Feature Shortcomings
One month in, the Switch still can’t stream music, movies, or TV shows. It can’t play YouTube videos. It can’t really do anything except for play games, and while it may do that one thing well, the competition does it just as well, if not better.
Sure, Nintendo’s lightning-fast game load times are gaming’s most pleasant retro revival in 2017, but this is offset quite a bit by the system’s offensively diminutive 32 GB hard drive. Breath of the Wild eats up more than a third of that space on its own. Worse, Japanese Switch owners already have a game that requires 32 GB, which the Switch doesn’t even have available after mandatory system storage is taken into account.
The ability to use SD cards is a bit of a workaround, but it’s not a solution. The storage shortage (sorry) isn’t really something Nintendo can fix other than potentially selling a future Switch model with a bigger hard drive. Nintendo has shown no indication to date that it has plans to do that, however, so if it is coming, it’s probably a ways off. Plus, that’s asking your early adopters to pay to fix a hardware shortcoming so obvious that it should be downright embarrassing for Nintendo.
Meanwhile, we still don’t know when or which multimedia functions are coming to the Switch. Nintendo of America COO Reggie Fils-Aime did at least give owners cause for some optimism here, though. Fils-Aime told the Washington Post that it’s been in talks with service providers like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon and that those types of services would “come in time” to the Nintendo Switch. For now, though, there’s not much compelling for anyone who finishes Breath of the Wild to do.
