Wii U Has 8 GB of Internal Storage

[mrstickball]

Khuutra said:

mrstickball said:

You'll be able to, but you'll be in the small minority that will add an SD card or USB drive.

And that's the problem. If a developer gets feedback that, say, only 2 in 10 WiiU users have add-on drives, then they'll know that the likelihood of their content selling well is going to be very, very poor.

Look at the developers that utilize any perpherial piece of hardware among any console - Wii's balance board, Kinect, Move, and so on. Very few utilized any of those devices, despite the fact that many sold very well. The likelihood of users purchasing SD/USB hard drives is arguably less likely than those devices. So think of the likelihood that a developer is going to utilize Nintendo's download services, knowing that, say, there are only a few users that will likely have the space available for their content.

Mark my words. Nintendo will suffer for it immensely. The AAA publishers are going to back away from developing tentpole DLC as fast as they can when they get the sales numbers for their 1GB+ content packs.

You'll pardon me for being unconvinced.

I think you would be surprised how low the percentage of any console userbase that buys DLC is, and that includes the 360. I don't have the number of 4GB consoles sold over the past couple of years, but somebody on the site might...?

And "tentpole" DLC isn't really the question, because exclusive DLC has never been shown to be a significant mover of software, much less hardware. Availability of identical DLC will be enough, and that's all that will matter.

You are pretending that this is a much larger investment on the part of developers than it is.

Tentpole DLC as in DLC that ha key component of a titles' deployment strategy. For example: Call of Duty, Fallout, Battlefield, Mass Effect 3, and so on. Titles that release 3+ pieces of content. If these developers don't sell a lot of DLC on the WiiU, its likely that they won't promote/release it, which will significantly degrade sales of said series on the WiiU, and hurt the overall userbase of the WiiU.

For AAA titles, you see attach rates between 25-35% for very successful content. That's before you factor in users that do not have online. Titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops sell over one piece of content for every retail unit sold. That is a lot of rolling the dice to assume that users will have sufficient memory space for the content on the WiiU, hence my believe that the WiiU will be hurt in the long run. Analysts will factor this into their ROI projections, and it will not be favorable for WiiU.

Also, I am assuming that Nintendo keeps the WiiU for more than 3 years at market. As the next generation goes on, online content will more and more prominent. F2P games will become start shining next generation, and that will put Nintendo in a very precarious situation, as there is no way that an 8GB HDD will be able to store sufficient content for such a system.