Wii U Has 8 GB of Internal Storage

[Mr Khan]

mrstickball said:

Which numbers do you want me to cite? If you don't accept analysts, then what do you want? Nintendo doesn't release their figures. As for games themselves, Activision themselves stated that Call of Duty: Black Ops had over 20 million map packs sold in a year of being on market (source: http://www.joystiq.com/2011/11/09/call-of-duty-black-ops-has-moved-20-million-map-packs-to-date/)

That puts the attach rate of COD map packs at 1 pack per retail title sold, or greater.

Certainly, people will go out and buy an SD/USB to add on memory for content, but what you've done is called "Adding a step in the conversion funnel". That is, you're adding an additional step in a given process to get users to purchase something. In all web-based services, that is a very bad thing, because you lose users in the process.

I agree that SD cards are cheap - in fact, they are so cheap, I have no idea why Nintendo didn't put a larger card in the WiiU. That is my entire point. The more space that the WiiU has by default, the more likely a user is to download content. Nintendo earns a percentage of each piece of content sold, even if its third party. Therefore, any money spent on the cost of the card would be made up and then some by the user purchasing content. If Nintendo failed to do that, then they have two reasons:

1) They genuinely do not understand the online market and online user. This will be disasterous for them, because online components of next-gen consoles will be a huge factor for all companies.

2) They do understand the market, and are choosing to ignore it. This would mean that they do not believe that this market segment will be a key component of their user base. If that is the case, then they aren't anticipating many core users or titles to come to the WiiU, which is a huge problem.

As for the argument of "If people want DLC, they will go to any lengths to get it". That is very, very wrong. If that were true, then no publisher would bother with marketing, press releases, or anything to notify users of DLC, its availability, or work with online services to push and promote downloadable content. Additionally, there are tons of white papers/sources out there that will state time and time again that users are far more likely to purchase content, or purchase a downloadable title if they are aware of it. Self-discovery is very over-rated in the digital world, and marketing is still key. What does that mean in regards to memory? Not every user will go to great lengths to get content, such as buying an additional hard drive. You'll notice that every time the Xbox 360 had a major bundle with a big AAA game such as Call of Duty, they never bundled it with the 4GB model. Why? DLC. They knew the user would want that content. And as stated, we're going to see a huge shift in Microsoft back to having a default HDD, because they now have a method to recoup the costs of the hard drive via content.

Internal memory will be huge. Mark my words. I am willing to eat my own words if I'm wrong, but I am certain I will not be wrong about this. Both the next Xbox and Playstation will have more hard drive space available than the WiiU. Not by a small margin, but by dozens of times' more space. That will allow them to leverage that significantly to defeat Nintendo next generation.

I think on that part Khuutra meant that if people have been made aware of DLC that they want, they will then make it so that they are able to get it. A 64 GB SD Card is like what, $35 now? I remember getting 250 GB for $100 around Christmas 2009. A relatively small extra investment will enable people to buy all the DLC they please, or just the dlc they please, if they have been made aware of it.