The most powerful systems are never the sales leader

[sethnintendo]

HappySqurriel said:

goforgold said:

if the wii was as powerful, nevermind more, it would have twice as many sales as it currentlys has, and there wouldn't be a single 3rd party that wouldn't be supporting it the shit out it. It'd have BETTER support than the ps2 and ps3 would have been in real deep shit

The relationship between the cost of increasing power for a platform and the value people see in that increase is (generally) pretty well understood. On the low end of the processing power scale the cost to increase processing power is low and the value people see in that increase is high, while at the high end of the scale the cost associated with increasing processing power is high and the value people see from that increase is low. This is the reason why the HD console's this generation were so heavily subsidized; people saw less value in the processing power than it cost to implement it, and the systems couldn't sell for their true cost of production.

 

With this in mind, the Wii (probably) could have benefitted from increased processing power but long before they matched the capabilities of the HD consoles the benefit consumers saw would be minimized. It is difficult to know what the ideal performance would be, but I suspect that the Wii would stop seeing sales benefit at 2 to 4 times its current processing power.

I agree with you with the Wii could have increased sales if it had 2-4 times more power.  Maybe they could have made it a little more powerful thus ending with a 300 price tag at launch.  However, I think Nintendo really wanted to stay in the mid 200 range (and not sell the system at a loss).  When people started dissing the Wii at launch saying it was like 2 GCN ducktaped together,  I was like hell give that to me since 2 GCN duck-taped together would mean that it was 2x the power of the GCN.  I was already pleased with GCN graphics.  I suppose the expectations on power/graphics for next generation machines has gone up.  Back during 8,16,32,64 bit days most manufactures just had to worry about doubling the power.  Now I guess it is more 4x-8x.