What real 'next gen' is there actually in the Wii U...?!

[Zim]

thetonestarr said:

Oh, there absolutely is a big difference there. But right now, anybody doing something multiplat is a moron if they don't at least look into porting it to WiiU too. Right now, it's going to be easy as pie to port the games, and they'll absolutely find enough sales to at least make it worthwhile (already-developed games that are easy to port really only need to make 50,000-100,000 sales to turn a profit on the port).

This is going to end up getting them all used to working on it while also giving WiiU a respectable early lineup. Respectable early lineup = more early adopters. More early adopters = larger potential market. And larger potential market = developers are more interested in taking advantage of it.

And since games can be 100% traditional on the WiiU without sacrificing ANY potential buyers whatsoever (except those that refuse to play things that don't use the screen), I really don't see devs not being interested. It just doesn't make sense. The only reason we didn't see more games on the Wii wasn't because it was weaker. There was almost absolutely zero concern there (save from companies like Epic, who are very few and far between). The main issue was that devs didn't want to have to do motion controls, or wanted to be able to do more than the Wiimote + nunchuck could offer WITHOUT motion controls, and the Classic Controller sales were far too low to do that. There just wasn't a big enough market on the Wii for traditional games.

But WiiU's userbase will be 100% traditional-game capable. And since graphically, it won't be lacking either (even in comparison to neXtbox/PS4, it's really going to be more like the difference between current 360 vs current top-of-the-line PC at most), the devs that were once iffy on graphical capability won't be anymore.

And actually, the WiiU will be also setting the first standard for next generation, especially since Sony and MS didn't announce anything this year - meaning they probably aren't releasing until 2014 (honestly, if they were releasing next year, they would have announced something at E3 to try stealing any attention from WiiU that they possibly could. Hold back the competition as much as possible, etc, etc). Two years as the best thing on the market will make WiiU's initial installbase pretty respectable, even if it starts off particularly slow. Assuming it starts off really slow, they'll have an installbase of 20m by PS4/neXtbox release, and if it's a runaway success, could be around 50m. Either way, it'll have been wildly successful financially for Nintendo. Remember, GCN turned a consistent profit, keeping Nintendo always in the black, at only 22m final installbase.

There is no way they are both leaving it until 2014. You are forgetting there was only a 6 month or so gap between announcing the 360 and releasing it. Not only this but Sony and MS need the profits from these later years. Announcing their next gen offering too early would hurt sales during the most profitable stage. Especially when this early on they would have nothing to show and would have to use target renders. Which really they didn't need when the UE4 tech demo, Agini's philosophy and watch dogs were already showing what their next gen machines would be like. 

Either MS or Sony will launch holiday 2013. I wouldn't be surprised if it was both of them. If only one does then the other will likely launch March 2014. 

Also the reason we didn't see more games on wii was 100% because it was weaker. Well actually that it lacked features which I think a lot of people tie into being weaker. You couldn't simply downport games like assassin's creed because the Wii's archtiecture was outdated and couldn't handle many things. It wasn't just a case of lowering resolution, texture quality etc. It was a case of having to rebuild the engine. The Wii U has hopefully fixed that problem. As it sounds as though it has all the modern features it should need. Where you can simply downport things easily.