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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Kimishima Nintendo Investor Q&A (New NX Info, More 3DS, Wii U = Dead)

Mummelmann on 29 April 2016
Soundwave said:
Mummelmann said:

It's good business to miss the craziest shopping season of the year? There's a reason manufacturers and game developers flood the last quarter with games and devices; this is the season when a lot more consumers buy a lot more stuff they wouldn't buy otherwise.
Look at the figures for revenue in all sectors of shopping for the holiday season and tell us again how it's good business to miss this opportunity. Heck; look at vgchartz own numbers and the fact that roughly half of a calendar year's worth of sales comes in the last quarter of the year, with the last six weeks of the year often trippling or more the weekly numbers of previous quarters weekly numbers.

I'm sorry, but this is some really strange reasoning. New products do not get discounts if they launch during the holidays; they may well sell great numbers due to news value though. Look at how (relatively) well the Wii U did in its launch window over the holidays, and then look at how fast it sank into the 1st quarter, imagine if they postponed the launch until March the following year, the numbers would have been disastrous and the whole product could have lost absolutely all credibility as a commodity from the very start.

I think they honestly tried pretty hard to make the holiday season. They probably could have launched it in November, but they would have had supply issues possibly from having to fab a 14nm chip (which is too power efficient for them to pass up). I think actually they could have launched with just Zelda and Paper Mario + a bunch of third party ports if they absolutely had for November, but they probably would've been screwed for the next 2-4 months after that and would have had to suffer through a similar drought as the 3DS/Wii U and taking all that into account, they opted to move back into March.

If they can't have Christmas, I think they settled on having NX at least by the end of the fiscal year end.

Oh, I'm 100% sure they were aiming for a holiday release, the March date is likely a result of complications and not a smart decision. However, I still hold that, if given the option, missing the holiday season on purpose is not "good business"...



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Nem on 29 April 2016

"- Wii U will only have 800k shipment for the year, the positive according to Kimishima is they can focus on the 3DS now (ouch for Wii U die-hards)"

I think he was talking about manufacturing, not software development. Not to say the Wii U will have new stuff, but it's what he is talking about.

This does make it sound more likely that the NX is indeed a home console. We shall see.



Soundwave on 29 April 2016

I wonder if Nintendo is just content to keep the 3DS around as a cheap kids-centric portable until maybe something like the NX chip can be die shrunk all the way down to 10nm, making it suitable for a full blown portable. That might take until 2018 though.

I get the sense they have no interest in just making a moderately updated next-gen portable that would have Vita++ graphics ... it's unify or bust, they don't want to have to support two seperate platforms with relatively high graphics requirements for both.



JEMC on 29 April 2016
Soundwave said:

I think they honestly tried pretty hard to make the holiday season. They probably could have launched it in November, but they would have had supply issues possibly from having to fab a 14nm chip (which is too power efficient for them to pass up). I think actually they could have launched with just Zelda and Paper Mario + a bunch of third party ports if they absolutely had for November, but they probably would've been screwed for the next 2-4 months after that and would have had to suffer through a similar drought as the 3DS/Wii U and taking all that into account, they opted to move back into March.

If they can't have Christmas, I think they settled on having NX at least by the end of the fiscal year end.

I don't really buy the hardware problems excuse, because Nintendo could have had a steady launch with one or two regions being able to purchase the console this Christmas and the rest by March.

Mind you, it's not the best strategy, but it's certainly better than skipping Christmas alltogether and betting it all on March.



Please excuse my bad English.

Currently gaming on a PC with an i5-4670k@stock (for now), 16Gb RAM 1600 MHz and a GTX 1070

Steam / Live / NNID : jonxiquet    Add me if you want, but I'm a single player gamer.

Miyamotoo on 29 April 2016
Nem said:
"- Wii U will only have 800k shipment for the year, the positive according to Kimishima is they can focus on the 3DS now (ouch for Wii U die-hards)"

I think he was talking about manufacturing, not software development. Not to say the Wii U will have new stuff, but it's what he is talking about.

This does make it sound more likely that the NX is indeed a home console. We shall see.

"This slide shows announced 3DS titles launching in the American and European markets in April 2016 or later, including titles planned for future release. As in Japan, there are many more titles planned for future release, and other unannounced titles that are currently in development."



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Soundwave on 29 April 2016
JEMC said:
Soundwave said:

I think they honestly tried pretty hard to make the holiday season. They probably could have launched it in November, but they would have had supply issues possibly from having to fab a 14nm chip (which is too power efficient for them to pass up). I think actually they could have launched with just Zelda and Paper Mario + a bunch of third party ports if they absolutely had for November, but they probably would've been screwed for the next 2-4 months after that and would have had to suffer through a similar drought as the 3DS/Wii U and taking all that into account, they opted to move back into March.

If they can't have Christmas, I think they settled on having NX at least by the end of the fiscal year end.

I don't really buy the hardware problems excuse, because Nintendo could have had a steady launch with one or two regions being able to purchase the console this Christmas and the rest by March.

Mind you, it's not the best strategy, but it's certainly better than skipping Christmas alltogether and betting it all on March.

There are problems beyond just not having enough systems. When you have bad yields, you have large amounts of unusable chips ... guess who's left on the hook for that ...

So if the 14nm yields are bad, it's possibly Nintendo told them to call off the dogs until the process can be smoothed out rather than continue to eat losses on bad batches of chips.



Soundwave on 29 April 2016
Nem said:
"- Wii U will only have 800k shipment for the year, the positive according to Kimishima is they can focus on the 3DS now (ouch for Wii U die-hards)"

I think he was talking about manufacturing, not software development. Not to say the Wii U will have new stuff, but it's what he is talking about.

This does make it sound more likely that the NX is indeed a home console. We shall see.

I'd say it's pretty much a lock now. Could be a semi-mobile console I guess, but it sounds like a console for sure. Kimishima even says basically that NX won't impact 3DS shipments, while Wii U shipments will dramatically fall off.

So it must be a product that's closer to the Wii U than 3DS.



JEMC on 29 April 2016
Soundwave said:
JEMC said:

I don't really buy the hardware problems excuse, because Nintendo could have had a steady launch with one or two regions being able to purchase the console this Christmas and the rest by March.

Mind you, it's not the best strategy, but it's certainly better than skipping Christmas alltogether and betting it all on March.

There are problems beyond just not having enough systems. When you have bad yields, you have large amounts of unusable chips ... guess who's left on the hook for that ...

So if the 14nm yields are bad, it's possibly Nintendo told them to call off the dogs until the process can be smoothed out rather than continue to eat losses on bad batches of chips.

That depends on the deal. AMD had a deal with Global Foundries with its Bulldozer CPUs where they only payed for the working chips, encouraging GloFo to improve their manufacturing process.

There is nothing that frobids Nintendo to have a similar deal with AMD and GloFo too.



Please excuse my bad English.

Currently gaming on a PC with an i5-4670k@stock (for now), 16Gb RAM 1600 MHz and a GTX 1070

Steam / Live / NNID : jonxiquet    Add me if you want, but I'm a single player gamer.

Soundwave on 29 April 2016
JEMC said:
Soundwave said:

There are problems beyond just not having enough systems. When you have bad yields, you have large amounts of unusable chips ... guess who's left on the hook for that ...

So if the 14nm yields are bad, it's possibly Nintendo told them to call off the dogs until the process can be smoothed out rather than continue to eat losses on bad batches of chips.

That depends on the deal. AMD had a deal with Global Foundries with its Bulldozer CPUs where they only payed for the working chips, encouraging GloFo to improve their manufacturing process.

There is nothing that frobids Nintendo to have a similar deal with AMD and GloFo too.

Possible though Nintendo needing millions of chips in a such a short time span could complicate that considerably.



Intrinsic on 29 April 2016

Guess it would be easy to approximate just how powerful the NX will be.

If they plan on selling the console at a profit.... even if said profit is $1, that means thy are making a $300/$400 console if they plan on having something on par with a PS4/PS4k.

Question now is what will Sony do? if Sony keeps the PS4 and PS4k as two seperate consoles (meaning they don't replace one with the other) it could mean that at the time the NX launches you could buy a PS4 for $199 and a PS4k for around $349. Don't can afford to take a loss on the hardware considering the kinda Install base lead they have.

Should be interesting.