Did Nintendo Miss Their Opportunity By Undercooking the Wii U's Specs?

[HoloDust]

HappySqurriel said:

HoloDust said:

That's where I see actual problem 3rd parties have - it's not that they can't make it look better, it's that WiiU is not strong enough to just port to it with somewhat higher settings and instanlty have better looking/performing version. If you have to spend some significant amount of extra cash to get the job done cause Ninty went tad cheap on some cruical components, that might avert early on some devs (like Metro devs) from porting at all, unless they see in some future significant user base that is actually buying usual PS30 "hardcore" titles on WiiU.

7+ years of working on the XBox 360 and PS3 has ensured that they already have mature tools that are highly optimized for these platforms, to see a significant visual improvement without putting the time into optimizing the engine for the new platform would require dramatically more processing power. It would be possible to produce this hardware but I'm not convinced Nintendo could have and kept the system's price around $300.

I don't think move from 360 to WiiU is that much different - actually, I think their architectures have much more in common than 360 and PS3. This is why, in my opinion, by just having somewhat more powerfull CPU and 128bit bus, WiiU would be more than capable of doing what I wrote earlier - easy ports with slightly higher settings/assets, with no significant time/cash spend on fine tuning. It would raise production cost slightly, but to be honest, I don't think they would need to increase price at all - that Reggie's statement to me sounds like lot of bollocks, I think they are profitable, at least on Deluxe version, from the start.