Experimental42 said:
If Nintendo releases a new console early and Sony/Ms claim their new system will be X amount more powerful in a couple years, Nintendo's console will f*cking die. Nobody will want to develop for the weaker console, no one will want the weaker games, and the PS5 would likely have a better power to price ratio. |
Which happens behind closed doors, they can't even get information on that kind of stuff from AMD (if they happen to be the vendor), because that information is kept under NDA until the agreements drop and Nintendo wouldn't know for sure what they have in their boxes until Sony and Microsoft announce them, which would already be too late if they wanted to launch within a similar time frame.
If their plan was to announce their platform, with firm specs after Sony and Microsoft then they'll be launching years after both of those systems, because that's how long it takes to get R&D done and set all of the schedules for manufacturing, they may not even be able to get hold of the technology they'd want because the providers of said tech may be at capacity because they're trying to fulfil the needs of other customers. Especially if they go for some of the newer technologies.
No the best thing for Nintendo is to concentrate on righting the wrongs that they've made in online, focus on developing their own studios to provide the kinds of games that will change their image to one of a more diverse nature that appeals to the gamers that buy 3rd party games, that way they can legitimately go to 3rd party publishers and get them onboard to publisher their games on the next platform. Nintendo needs to ask for help from external studios to find out what hardware they need to put in their next box. Making Wii U's line-up more diverse now would probably actually give it more mass market appeal and drive the sales up, especially if the machine's price drops like a stone within a year or so.
If anything they can stretch the Wii U's life by actually dropping games that diversify the line-up to fit in with 3rd party, even if it costs Nintendo profits, because they need to pay to show the community they want to change, that they're willing think about the broader market. It doesn't mean they have to give up on their main staples of Mario and the other traditional titles that they have done, but if they can cater to a wider audience then 3rd party publishers see that there's potential for their games in the future.
Nintendo has more issues than their platform not being that powerful compared to the competition, it goes much deeper than hardware performance. Running on the Wii U for too long may be damaging, being first to market with some game changing tech, that will definitely be substantially more powerful than PS4 in 3 years from now is not a bad move in the slightest, espcially if it's backed by a different stance on the overall library Nintendo brings to the platform themselves and their online network is a step ahead of the competition.
Another factor I almost forgot was that Nintendo needs to get better with their system software support for external developers, this was apparently a major issue why Wii U lost it's 3rd party support so early (besides not being X86 or having the gap in hardware performance it did).
