happydolphin said:
It all depends on the type of victory. If it's a full victory like for the PS2, then no as the charts show. If it's a partial victory, like for Wii vs HD, then yes the tie-ratio will be lower. But that doesn't change the point that the Cube profitted from a HW & SW standpoint, HW being the first case anyways. I brought up software because someone mentioned the game divisions performance and Nintendo's accounts for SW & HW, so the figures needed to be mentioned. But The cube went for something like 50$ loss-leading for a few months and jumped into profitability quite soon afterwards (as far as I know), so odds are that at 22Mil units sold, with margin made on most units sold, the Cube was profitable and very comparatively to the PS2 from a HW standpoint, despite being a more capable system. Ultimately, it's all about timing and HW architecture and design. Nintendo is good at using cheaper yet still performing hardware and make something potent with it, as it was with the Gekko processor and Flipper Graphics Chip. |
I would term their approach as efficiency of design ...
If what we know about the Wii U hardware is true then Nintendo could have (probably) had prototype hardware built in 2008/2009 that was based on unmodified components. For the next 2 to 3 years they could have had demo-software to represent games running on their current iteration of the hardware, evaluated bottlenecks and limitations, and resolved them producing a newer revision of the hardware to be tested. They could cycle through this process dozens of times over the next several years until they had hardware that performed exactly how they wanted it to.
If done well, you end up with hardware that is inexpensive because it is (essentially) 3 or 4 year old hardware that performs as well as brand new hardware under the conditions you were evaluating. Of course, if you make poor assumptions your system will perform like 3 or 4 year old hardware under the conditions of certain games.
This is (of course) easiest to explain with fixed functionailty GPUs where Nintendo could assume that all games would use Bump-maps and built in support in the hardware, but it is still a viable approach with programmable hardware.
