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happydolphin on 04 April 2012
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Viper1 said:
happydolphin said:
Viper1 said:
The Wii is actually capable of internally rendering an HD image. But it's output is capped at 480p. There are 2 reasons for this.

1. Initial HDTV adoption rates were minimal. Upping the Wii specs to do HD well would not have been cost beneficial.

2. Just because you can render at a resolution doesn't mean your textures, polygon counts, frame rates and everything else will be dandy. In fact, resolution isn't the end all, be all graphic factor to begin with. Look at how many HD consoles games are not even rendered in actual HD resolutions. A lot of them...but you can't tell because the shaders, texture resolutions, polygon counts and other factors are more predominant in how 'good' your graphics look.


Okay, so my question to you is:

1. What about foresight. What about HD did they not believe in for it to be, 3-5 years down the road, ubiquitous. How much would a preventive measure costed to actually offer an HDMI port, in all realism. What would have been the cost?

2. If the X360, launched in late 2005 pulled off high-end graphics with higher texture resolution, shaders and poly counts, was cost the real question. How much did Wii launch at 280$? How much profit were they making on each unit and didn't the cube launch at a similar price? Why the change in HW strategy? I can understand a change in marketing strategy and only focusing on casual SW, that's fine, but why not leave the door open for 3rd parties if they so needed, did Nintendo not believe in its own success and foresee Sony's possible flop at launch? This was 7 years ago, our mindsets were very different as to manufacturer position in the industry at the time.

1. This would only be good foresight if 2 could be applied feasibly.

2. Wii launched at $250 and supposedly $30 of that went toward Wii Sports (remember it was sold sperately in Japan where the Wii launched for ~$212).  Don't forget you received a Wii remote adn nun-chuck.  Another $40 or so in costs.   Profit was decent at launch ($20-$30 if I had to guess...there are no figures on this).  GC launched at $199.  Actually, no, they didn't foresee their own success.  They've alluded to that many times.  Keep in mind the X360 took major losses on that hardware and had major hardware flaws along with it.  It wasn't until just a year or so ago that they were finally ironed out.  

The costs associated with increasing the capability of the Wii to ensure adequated HD rendering (this means texture resolutions, polygon counts, shader operations, etc...) would have taken the Wii either way out of profitabilty range or priced far higher than what the market would have accpeted.  Another factor was 100% backwards compatability with the Gamecube.   That would been insanely difficult or insanely expensive if they changed architectures (as would be required at the time) to compete directly on horsepower

Don't forget that one of the factors going into developing the Wii was to give 3rd parties a cheaper development alternative to the expensive to develop for HD consoles.   Making the Wii just as powerful would have removed that option for 3rd parties.

Vic, don't mind if I post this in my new thread, very interesting stuff, let's continue there. (I think you posted there before I got mixed up )