Sony/Microsoft Could Make Nintendo Very Uncomfortable This Holiday

[DanneSandin]

DevilRising said:

DanneSandin said:

I was talking in the long run... If the PS4 is launched with a $349 price tag it would be seriously competitive, and if you add all the 3rd party games it'll have that Wii U WON'T have... It becomes quite clear that Wii U will be another N64/GC for Nintendo (I'm guessing 40m units sold in total - or there about)

Even if that wound up being true, it's not like that would be a bad thing. They only sold 20 something million units of the Gamecube and still made profit that gen. 40 Million, while far short of the Wii's near-100 million benchmark, would still be a triumph for them. Bear in mind that I honestly don't think the PS4 or Nextbox will wind up selling as much as their predeccesors did either. It's just a sign of the times, the economy was much better in the early years of those systems than it is right now. 

And I'm not so sure Wii U will sell that "badly" anyway. Also, again, I don't think Wii U will be missing out on AS many multi-plat titles as it did with Wii. With Wii, the hardware was enough behind the PS360 that while it was still developers being lazy (considering they downported games to DS and PSP just fine), there was some wiggle room for justicfication. But with Wii U, while it would certainly be the "weakest" hardware-wise, it won't be the same gap, and with Wii U's GPU especially, it should stay competitive, and if Wii U is a cheaper console (and more inexpesnsive to develop on), I really don't see much holding it back from getting a lot more multi-plat titles this time round. Just saying.

The question is though, if the multiplats would be gimped, as were the case with the Wii... PS4 is quite the substantial leap over Wii U, and this has to effect porting games somewhat... I've heard that engines will be extremely scalable, so as long as it's worthwhile for devs to port games I think they will,since dev costs will rise this gen - but I guess it all depends on how much it'll cost to port and how much the games will sell...

While the GC did bring in some profits, Nintendo survived thanks due to their handhelds during the early 2000's. I think that it was Hiroshi (former president of Nintendo) that said that the DS would either take them to heaven or to hell (or something along those lines). This view really helps explain what a situation Nintendo was in back then. But then again, they had just left the N64 behind them - which didn't sell like hot cakes either. So the question is if the handheld market will be able to sustain them in the future as well...