Steroid said:
This is a slam dunk to Nintendo fanatics. I too remember the days when the Big N spoon feed me bullshit about optical disk consoles being a horrible idea- Only to breath a sigh of relief when they dumped the carts by the next gen.
And again history repeats itself. But the excuses and justifications only thinly veil the feeling that Nintendo missed the boat. Again. |
Nintendo's main objection to optical discs was the long loading times and piracy protection, both legitimate concerns at the time. They made a call that short loading times and copy protection were more going to be more important than the benefit of larger storage space. Were they wrong, in retrospect, probably yes.
They went to optical discs the following generation and what do you know they made that transition when they were confident that loading times were no longer such an issue (GC was great in this regard) and when the were fairly confident they had an optical format that was at least reasonably resistant to piracy (unlike CD).
Similarly, they claimed the move to HD was premature given HD TV penetration and development costs associated with HD game manufacture. Were they wrong? I would argue that it depends very much on how you look at it.
Nintendo didn't have anything against opticals discs, or online or HD per se, rather they argued their profitability in that time space was questionable. Now you can hate them for this stance but as has been pointed out again and again, gaming is their only business and they have to pay much closer attention to the bottom line than Sony has to.
If Nintendo had put their R+D this generation into producing a powerful console on par with Sony and MS, rather than on motion control, and included Blu-Ray or similar such format, where would they be now and how many more development houses would have closed without the benefit of profits from Wii games?
