Nintendo WiiU is not a next-generation system!

[Joelcool7]

IamAwsome said:

o_O.Q said:
i see a lot of people saying the jump won't be big but my question is - whats the point of launching a nextbox and ps4 unless they are significantly more powerful or have some kind of differentiating feature to their predecessors?

They will be signifigantly more powerful than their predecessors, but not the Wii U.

That is a very bold an un-logical statement.

One big reason is retail price. Nintendo has already stated that their new WiiU controller is going to make the console pretty pricey. So in theory that would mean the competition could create a more powerful unit for the same manufacturing price right? Wrong, Microsoft has stated Kinect is the future and when it was first announced Microsoft said it would start coming with future X-Box's. Rumors and facts suggest that a Kinect device will likely come default with the Nex-Box. In that case the Kinect device will cost as much if not more then the WiiU controller. This means if Microsoft wanted superior hardware it would likely cost a lot more then WiiU. Sony is the only one that could technically pull off a drastic raise in power for PS4. However Sony is well aware of what happened with PS3 and they will not likely sell the hardware at a loss. This means the hardware will not be a similar leap to other generations.

Software development is another big one. THQ has out right said a generational leap like what occured between PS2 and PS3 would bring up dev costs so high that the retail price of games would be at least 100$. Other developers have commented that they would need to sell 3x or so as many units to break even. So a game would need to sell like 1.5 million copies just to break even considering UbiSoft said that this generation a game wouldn't be a success unless it broke the 500k mark.

Ports Nex-Box and WiiU are bound to be very similar in power if Kinect is incorporated into Nex-Box. So Sony would be at a loss if they were to drastically superior. They would loose multiplatform development to a degree and with a higher dev cost exclusives would be less likely as well.

Profit margins ties into all this. Say Microsoft and Nintendo's consoles are both around the same specs (5x PS3), Sony could release a slightly more powerful unit at a cheaper manufacturing price then Nintendo's WiiU or Microsoft's Nex-Box. This means every PS4 sold would profit Sony more then every Nex-Box and WiiU sold.

In the end it just makes logical sense that we will not see any console (Significantly improve on current gen tech) its impractical and risky. All three companies are going to try and create cheaper and more profitable hardware. Nobody will want to repeat the PS3 fiasco in fact even 360 lost money initially. The three manufacturers are likely to try and keep any loss of money to a minimum.

I suspect all three consoles to launch around 400$. With WiiU and Nex-Box possibly next winter and PS4 in 2013. All three consoles will be within a few times the power of one another.