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Soundwave on 11 September 2012
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Crono141 said:
Soundwave said:

My personal feeling on this has been that this strategy could work for Nintendo IF:

The system is expandable somehow and can be upgradable cheaply in the future. In 2 years time, the 28nm manufacturing process will be matured, and the cost of things like GDDR5 RAM and a 2TFLOP GPU will be dirt cheap.

If the Wii U had a cheap connector like a Crossfire port on the bottom of the unit, it could be expanded around mid/late 2014 and probably be brought up to par directly with the PS4/720 for people who really need that for probably as low as $99.

I don't think that would be a bad play. Launch in 2012 with a cheap machine, start building that userbase, and then have the option of future proofing as well.

If there's no way to expand the system though, I think Nintendo could be in some trouble here if Sony/MS slap LCD screens onto their next-gen controllers too. Because then Nintendo is stuck the next 3-4 years with a system that doesn't have anything particularily unique about it and is a good deal behind on the horsepower angle too.

In theory this is a good idea, but we know that in practice it just doesn't work.  For reference, look to Sega's 32X and CD addon.  It fragments your user base, and fragments your developer base.  Bad bad idea.

Completely different eras, in the early/mid-90s most game consumers had to rely on mommy and daddy to buy any and all video game hardware they got. Things have changed ... a lot.

The 32X and Sega CD also had very few good games and cost more than the base hardware itself. 32X was $150 alone I believe on top of the $99 Genesis, Sega CD was even more expensive.

A more modern comparable would be the Kinect add-on for the XBox 360 or Nintendo's RAM pak for the N64.

If Nintendo could introduce something affordable, like say for $99.99-$149.99 with a game bundled (Wii Fit principal) ... if I'm a Wii U owner, I'm more apt to stay with Nintendo rather than paying $400-$500 again to get a 720/PS4 for "next gen" gaming.

I think this could work today. The more scalable nature of third party games today also favors this today. Also obviously today with the rise of Crossfire/SLi ports in the PC industry, support for multiple processing units is no longer anything all that difficult or expensive.

It's a long shot, but I'd be very curious to see if the bottom of the Wii U has an Expansion Slot on there like the SNES/N64/GCN did. If Nintendo designed the Wii U in this way, I think it could be potentially brilliant.