If Nintendo repeats the Wii hardware strategy ...

[Viper1]

Soundwave said:

Viper1 said:

I think you are forgetting about capacity of the medium.

Some PS3 games already approach the entire 50 GB capacity of a dual layer Blu-ray disc.    You are suggesting they find a way to put those assets and the higher quality assets all one disc?   Going the 2 disc route just upped the cost.  Releasing 2 seperate SKu's is even more expensive.

You do realize PC games have different levels of assets stored on one disc that run on 5, 6, 7, 8 different hardware configs (let alone just 2) right? That doesn't make a game double the size.

None of this is anything particularily new. Devs deal with this stuff every day, lol.

The alternative -- not getting games like Mass Effect, BioShock, RE5, etc. etc. etc. isn't any better. At least this is a way for Wii U users to get the same games as everyone else and for Nintendo to still be able to turn a nice profit off their hardware and not have to sell the base console for a price that's outrageous (which would alienate the casual/soccer mom/kids group, which I'm guessing is a complete non-starter for Nintendo).

I think it's fair for Nintendo to say "well if you're a hardcore player and you really want these obscene specs so you can play these higher end games that start to come out as this generation wears on, we still want your business, but you're going to have to subsidize the cost of this extra hardware piece which we can sell you for cost". That sounds like a fair deal and reasonable compromise to me.

PC games are massively compressed.    Your install size and the size on the hard drive are very different.    Console games aren't compressed.

Now even if Wii U turns out to be underpowered compared to the PS3 and Next X, it won't have the developer abandonment the Wii had.  To port to Wii, you had to completely redo the game because of the difference in architecture and asset handling.   Because the Wiii Uuses modern shader architecturre, it's far easier to port down too it.  Going from shader model 3.0 to a fixed function TEV is very, very hard.  But Wii U will utilize at least shader model 4.1.  Even asset scaling would be simple.