Let's Retrospect: Why was Wii not HD ready? (A different gen 7)

[Viper1]

happydolphin said:

thekitchensink said:
Microsoft and (especially) Sony had to take gargantuan losses in order to release the 360 and PS3 at prices that were even remotely affordable. Those are giant corporations with tens of billions of dollars and other divisions to help prop the gaming divisions up for awhile.

Nintendo, being solely a game company and being last place in terms of console sales, couldn't afford that risk. They had to make money even if the Wii sold only five million. As seen in the huge shortages of the system, they couldn't possibly have predicted the wild success it was going to be.

But if the PS2 also suffered losses while the cube barely did, why couldn't they simply adobt a cube strategy? I know viper is answering that pretty well, but I want to see other POVs and I've asked him follow-up questions already.

The GC hardware strategy was a combination of low cost but highly efficient components.  The Wii actually continued that strategy but the difference was that you could create a console with that strategy and still be competitive against a brute force console (PS2 and Xbox) while that wasn't possible to do against the X360 and PS3.   The low cost/efficient style components simply didn't exist during the early development days of the Wii.