Will Sony and MS have the courage to compete with Nintendo in 2016?

[DanneSandin]

JustBeingReal said:

Thanks :)

 

1) I'd agree if moving over to unified memory and advanced, but cheap (if production starts somewhere between July-August 2018) processing technology wasn't easily accessible to them.

It also benefits their own developers.

The past choices only became stupid in hindsight, like N64's cartridge tech, cartridges had been standard for multiple generations and CD had been very expensive prior to PS1 coming out.

Gamecube didn't really have any stupid hardware querks.

Wii was the market leader and it's tech appealed to the masses, outside of the normal gamer crowd, so I'd argue that it's not necessarily stupid what Nintendo has done, at least from a perspective of the kind of technology they've used in their platforms.

 

X86 becoming a standard within the console market hasn't happened until the 8th gen, it's likely one of the primary reasons why Wii U doesn't get 3rd party support. Nintendo actually wanted 3rd party support for the Wii U, which is apparent from Reggie's comments when Wii U was unveiled, maybe it was all marketing fluff and no actual action (which is one stupid moment for Nintendo I'll give you,  given that devs later said that Nintendo's support for their hardware to external studios was very much lacking) to make the 3rd party/Nintendo relationship a solid one, but from a business and importantly a financial point of view if Nintendo wants money, then they need to develop their next system to work for all of their potential developer base.

Wii U appeals to Indies and Indies are the future too, so even if Nintendo looks to appease both their own studios and indies then they need to use technology that makes everyone's lives easier, which means Universal Memory (because of the flexibility that will bring) and obviously the cheaper, but more advanced AMD tech will just be so much better compared to what is currently in use on basically every console and PC.

The benefits of waiting for this memory  and processing architecture to become a thing are glaringly obvious to anyone that even takes a slight interest in the market, Nintendo are apparently looking to hire talented advisors on this, like Mark Cerny type figures to build their next platform, so it just makes sense that they'd use this tech in their next box.

 

2) We don't hear these rumblings from anyone besides people that don't develop on PS4 and XB1. At PSX the developers were saying that there's a lot of potential for what can be done on PS4, XB1 is similar architecture so by extension it to has a measure of that same potential, there's quite a bit of life left in both boxes, with GPGPU, HSA and all of those features that can be tapped into, that just hasn't happened yet.

Both consoles have the legs to achieve some amazing things 4-5 years from now, optimization has barely started, right now the results we're seeing are from just filling up the resources of each platform, not using them efficiently and refining code to the upteenth degree.

2019 would mean a 6 year standard, which fits with when Sony has released in the past. Sony and Microsoft don't want to P*** Off all of their install base by releasing too soon. The tech in both consoles isn't weak for it's intended market.

 

I guess it's always possible that with the tech being available to the industry that Sony and Microsoft will bite earlier and release in say 2018, but I just don't buy they'd be willing to annoy their respective install bases. A 5 year generation isn't really necessary when we haven't yet seen what PS4 or XB1 can really do. It's only when technology has been fully taken advantage of and developers can't do anything new with either system that it becomes necessary to release the successor to your current platform.

You're very much welcome!

I hope you're right about point one! Being a Nintendo fan, I'd like to see them give their HW the best possible chances and tech, so that would be really neat. But considering how Nintendo always seem to flounder with their HW I remain skeptical.

Since this is still early in the gen, I'd expect to see much improvements in the games to come, especially when we start to move away freom last gen more and more, and not trying to make a game fit for 4 different consoles spanning 2 gens... I'm no expert at all about these kind of things, but from what I gather, this gen isn't that big a leap in tech power that the last gen was, no? So that's why I'm thinking it won't last as long, and considering that most gen has lasted about 5 years, that's why I said 2018 - but 2019 isn't improbable at all. Maybe it makes more sense to launch new consoles then, but I don't think we'll have to wait to 2020 to see new systems from Sony and MS.

But the question is, how will Nintendo's console(s) stack up to PS5/XB2 if it's released quite a few yearS before them? I wonder how that'll effect Nintendo...