| Joelcool7 said: Honestly I think Microsoft planted the rumour about the next X-Box coming in 2015. I know for a fact that in like 09 Microsoft began hiring staff to work on a next gen Halo title, now some say that it was Reach but why did they call it next gen if Reach launched on 360. I think Nintendo will launch in winter 2012. Now I'd think Microsoft would launch the following winter. With PS4 coming possibly as late as 2015 just so that Sony manages to make PS3 profitable and make up for all the losses they took early this gen. As for power, some saying the next Nintendo console could be 720P or on par with PS3/360. That is possible but Nintendo would be in an awkward position. Sure for the year or so it had no competition titles could be ported from 360/PS3. But once 720/PS4 come , Nintendo would be in the same software predicament they are in right now. Where porting titles is very complicated. I suspect Nintendo to do a DreamCast, no not go down in flames. Launch a powerful new console a year before the competition. This console is powerful enough to be considered next gen but not a super computer. Then Microsoft would play Sony's part entering their 720 (PS2) and Sony would follow later on with PS4 (GC/X-Box). Nintendo has spent apparently like half a billion dollars a year on R&D. They should be able to give us a far superior system to PS3/360 for the cheap price of 250$. The question is how much will this innovation cost? Nintendo says the console will allow developers to do something they couldn't do on any other platform. How much will that cost I wonder. OT: I'm glad to see the majority heck I haven't found a single user that thinks Wii2 could come in 2015. Heck not even MS fans think Microsoft could wait that long. Though some have suggested Sony. |
I agree with you about processing power for the Wii, and I think that most people who expect a system that is about as powerful as the HD consoles assume Nintendo will follow the exact same strategy as they did in the last generation while ignoring the factors that led Nintendo to use that strategy.
What the Wii became was (more or less) decided before the Nintendo DS launched, and at this time "conventional wisdom" was that the Nintendo DS would fall far behind the PSP, the 'revolution' would be a market failure, and Nintendo would become a third party publisher like Sega. On top of this few people would have predicted the success of the Wii, and leading up to the Wii/PS3 launches many industry insiders believed that people would buy the $600 instead of the $250 Wii because they would see the 'value' in the PS3. Nintendo (effectively) managed the risk by re-using their previous generation hardware, which kept R&D and licencing costs down while also providing a very inexpensive to manufacture system.
Today the market conditions are very different, Nintendo has to pay for the R&D and licencing on new hardware anyways, and (when you're talking new hardware) the cost premium of producing something that is similar in performance to the HD consoles and something that is 4 to 8 times as powerful is actually not that significant. Hypothetically speaking, if Nintendo took the Radeon HD5770 or Radeon HD6770 and spent the money to have them migrated from he 40nm process to a 32nm or 28nm process Nintendo would have a GPU that was significantly more powerful than the HD consoles while being cost effective and energy efficient.
