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Squilliam on 04 April 2010
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HappySqurriel said:
Squilliam said:

Its not been successful because graphical improvements are bad, its been successful because the gameplay fundamentals they make are so good. In many ways their success has come inspite of the differing performance levels and this has not been a positive influence as it introduces dissonance in peoples minds about which system is appropriate, hence the large numbers of multi-console owners.

In the next generation it will be even more difficult to see a 3* improvement in performance due to diminishing returns. They have an advantage in that any system they release will be a huge jump over the previous generation and their support out of the gate will be astronomical. The PS3 showed how far you can get on goodwill alone, the next generation Wii console will likely show us how far you can get with effective leveraging of said goodwill.

By not selling their systems at a loss they are even more dangerous if they give people freedom to use their systems as they see fit. The likely next generation Wii will probably be as much a personal computer as console. Its easier to sell people a system and then sell them games than it is to sell them games to sell a system. Its the most obvious way to expand their market by making a console less proprietary and freeing up the imagination as to what tasks it can perform. This is the reason why I believe the Wii 2 will crush all next generation because Nintendo will learn from the successful tactics of Apple etc and throw open far greater possibilities.

As much as I think the iPod has shown value in producing a more open(ish) platform, and I think there is massive potential in giving people increased freedom in using their home consoles how they want to, I would personally advise Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo to keep this open-platform very restricted. What I would personally do is produce a "Homebrew" channel that was essentially a Linux virtual machine that could run Java applications on. By limiting it to Java applications that are running on top of the virtual machine the underlying hardware would be entirely abstracted from the developer, and the likelihood that they could find an exploit to generate a soft-mod would be fairly minimal; and even if some software damaged "the system" you could easily uninstall and reinstall the VM. The primary downside to an approach like this is that the over-head would drastically reduce the performance of most applications, but with how much processing power these systems could have that isn’t much of a concern.

In terms of using something like Java it would essentially be the same operating environment as the iPhone. There would be essentially no difference between a Nintendo app store and an iPhone app store aside from the obviously vast differences in available performance. In terms of mainline apps it would remain very restriced but Nintendo as a whole doesn't need to even sell games to make the system profitable and they can use the reverse strategy of selling the systems in order to then upstream these customers into buying games. Its a very effective counter to the razor/blades model and it effectively turns the tables on any other console manufacturer who tries to make a performance behemoth and then sell it restricted and under cost.



Tease.