The cloud was supposed to save us
If you want a laugh, and possibly a good cry once you think about the current state of the industry, watch this quick Kingdom Hearts PS2 versus Switch video. You’ll get the picture pretty quickly.
Uploaded by Kosimo, it shows the 2002 PS2 edition playing seamlessly (it just works!), juxtaposed to the Switch version, which has the following warning popping up on-screen, amid choppy gameplay: “Your network conditions are not good enough to play the game smoothly. The game session will end automatically. Please check your network conditions and settings.” Gripping!
While watching this, all I could think about is all the E3 presentations I watched where executives propped up the cloud as this monolithic one-size-fixes-all solution. While cloud-based applications are extremely useful in some industries, the idea of paying full (or nearly full) retail price to rent a buggy game is one of the worst uses in recent memory.
The Kingdom Hearts cloud editions are getting slammed at the moment around the gaming sphere, and had a shaky launch to boot. Calling the Switch cloud version “Masterpiece” in the title probably wasn’t the best move from a marketing perspective.
Amid the decision to move back the cloud edition of Dying Light 2Â for quality reasons, the whole cloud experiment on Switch is in a rough state at the moment. We didn’t even need this Kingdom Hearts PS2 versus Switch comparison video to point and laugh at it.
The thing is, the Switch can run all these games easily outside of Kingdom Hearts 3, which would need more work. They could have released physical editions of 1.5 + II.5 HD ReMIX to start.