Reggie, the Million games profit and a unfortunate declaration to NYT

[WereKitten]

Helios said:

WereKitten said:

Now, the fact that the statement I quoted is pure PR spin of a lie - as proved by the 720p emulators rendering of existing Wii games - is an entirely different issue :)

 

That has nothing to do with the fact that developers spend less money producing high resolution textures and other graphic elements during Wii development, simply because the Wii does not display them. Whether or not the system is theoretically capable of doing so has no relevance on this fact, and only makes it more likely that it was - in fact - a strategic decision by Nintendo, rather than a technological limitation.

It is both: the Wii GPU can't output HD because of a strategic decision by Nintendo.

The lie in the declaration lies in saying that the reason to not have an HD capable console was to keep development costs down. That is, they had to make a choice: either improved visuals with higher development costs or current costs with SD-only output.

The emulator proves that current Wii games - though having a lower budget - stil look much better in HD. Thus the previous dicothomy is a lie.

Nintendo's strategic decision was to make higher margins per console by using a cheaper GPU. This worked great for them in the business sense, as they are making heaps of money. Still, Reggie's declaration was the PR spin of a falsehood.

Anyway, this was just to clarify my first post, let's not get sidetracked.