Nintendo Confirms New Console, Evidently Powered by AMD

[Frogger]

Hiku said:

1.) Yeah, I was aware that you were specifically refering to first party titles. After all, there's not much else to talk about for Nintendo's home consoles as of late. (Even Bayonetta 2, one of few third party titles that come to mind, was funded by Nintendo themselves.) I'm saying that it's highly related to the lack of third party support, as the burden of expanding the console's library falls almost entierly on Nintendo themselves. As such, they not only have to produce a lot of games themselves, but often end up pushing forward their own releases to get them out for the holidays, etc. We can't really expect them to keep up the same pace several years later when they don't have many third party companies making big releases for their consoles in between to offset Nintendo's own games. Especially when their next console comes out the year after that. (You were refering to after 4 years, which is 2011, the year that had Skyward Sword at least. 2012 saw the release of Wii U, so naturally they had to focus their attentions there, seeing as no one else would.)
This is not a general thing that affects Sony or Microsoft though in their current state. This is a problem that Nintendo have created for themselves, and continue to do so with their hardware decisions.

But if 4 years is "absolutely plenty of time", then why has seemingly no successful home console (to my knowledge) had a lifespan as short as that? That would suggest that the console manufacturers don't think that 4 years is enough, which reflects on what the consumers think as well. So far, leaving a home console after only 4 years is seen as sign of desperation, since the original Xbox did this after getting copmpletely destroyed by the PS2. And while not to the same degree as Sega's Dreamcast, it was still widely seen as an unsuccessful console. Xbox managing to only sell 24 million, while its main competition, the PS2, sold a massive 155 million, shows that there was an enormous market they failed to tap into. And seeing as it also only managed to outsell the Gamecube (also highly regarded as a failed console) by a mere 2 million, I can't see how that is a prime example. Nor how it's another one. What other examples are there for home consoles? I can't really recall any. Off the top of my head, I can only think of Sega Master System  > Genesis, which was 3 years. And again, Sega did that out of desperation, as the Master System failed to meet expectations, having only sold 13-15M units, when its main competition (NES) sold 62M units. Even if you consider the original Xbox a success, it would still be an exception to the rule rather than the norm.

2.) You don't have to get the New 3DS at all to play the vast majority of the upcoming titles though. That's the major difference here. But if it's an actual successor to the platform, then you have to buy the new console at some point to play the upcoming games.

3.) I see. Well seeing as Wii U has a portable tablet that can stream its games (from a limited distance), it could perhaps be something like that that they're refering to, and want to expand on that idea. Obviously there should be no distance limitation.

About turning down the settings though, that suggests that the Fusion won't be much more advanced than the Wii U, which is already pretty far behind the PS4/XB1 as it is. (The Wii U only has 2 GB RAM, and only 1GB of that is available for games.)
I didn't really consider that the Fusion would be relatively weak compared to its competition once again seeing as that would once again alienate 3rd party developers, don't you think? Then again, I didn't consider the possibility of it sharing games with the Wii U either. That would change some things. So if it's released soon, 3rd party developers should be much more interested in making games for it compared to the Wii U, at least until PS5/XB2 come out. But that still hinges on the Fusion gettting a good install base. And switching consoles after 4 years sets the value of the Fusion for the consumers, as they can possibly expect the same short lifespan for the Fusion. So its pricepoint would be very important. Microsoft managed to release a successful console (360) after the original Xbox failed to meet expectations, and ditched it sooner than normal. However, I think everyone agrees that this was largely due to Sony's disasterous launch with the PS3. I don't think Nintendo will be betting on Sony and MS to screw up that badly next time.
And what happens to the third party support for Fusion when PS5 & XB2 come out? Then Nintendo's home console will be ecclipsed in the hardware department once again, possibly more than ever before (if the Fusion won't be much more powerful than a PS4), and after only 2-3 years since its launch.
I can't really wrap my head around that business decision.

Regarding turning down settings, I get what you mean, as you can use PC gaming as an example. But I think it's a bit more difficult than that. The PS4 and Xbox One are similar in architecture, and relatively similar in power. (Although arguably, it's a significant difference.) But in spite of that we're still seeing problems in maintaining resolution/framerate or details in between versions.
So if we add a much bigger difference in power between the consoles, the problem would only grow.
There's another, probably more important, issue as well. And that's that the games have to be able to run properly on all systems. Just turning down the details won't always solve that. Assuming Fusion has at least 8GB of RAM like PS4/XB1, what would be the point of having that much more RAM for the console, if developers have to adjust their games to be able to run with the 2GB (1GB) RAM of the Wii U?
As I mentioned , it's not always just a matter of turning down the settings. We can take Smash Bros 4 as an example. Ice Climbers were omitted from the game because the 3DS isn't powerful enough to handle two characters on the screen at once. (And by 2 at once, you have to account for all four players using the same character, making it 8 characters on the screen at once, half of them controlled by the A.I.) Because of this, and because similar to your idea with the Fusion, both versions of Smash were intended to have the same cast and play similarly, Ice Climbers were omitted from the Wii U version as well.

Now if third party developers are going into development for the Fusion with the idea that they have to tone down their games in order for them to function on both the Fusion and the Wii U, it creates a similar issue as before, where 3rd party developers once again can't make the games as good as they want on Nintendo's home console. That's why they skipped making games for Wii U. This can't be the case for the Fusion. At least I hope that's not what Nintendo are planning. If so, then they might as well stick with the Wii U for a while longer.

 

1. "Why has seemingly no successful home console had a lifespan as short as that? 

You answered your own question. No successful console had a lifespan that short. The Wii U is not a successful console. The Xbox was not a successful console. The Master's System was not a successful console. Even the GCN had a shorter life cycle than planned because it wasn't successful, as the Wii was originally a GCN accessory. They killed off dying consoles to make way for vastly more successful ones. The Xbox brand jumped from 25m to 80m because of this. Nintendo went from 22m to 100m. You think that the Wii U's situation isn't desprate? You think it's not getting completely destroyed by the competition? You think the PS4 and XBO don't have a huge market that Nintendo has failed to tap into? Nintendo has set itself up for a textbook reason why consoles lives are cut short to begin with. The GCN was able to live longer than the Wii U will because it didn't participate in almost three years of lost profit. It was a commercial failure, but not a financial one. The Wii U is both.

No one would be claiming that a Wii U successor would release in 2016 if the Wii U was actually successful. That's just obvious. It has no future. The Wii U's two most financially powerful console movers, Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, are already out. Nothing the Wii U outputs from now on will be moving the amount of consoles that those did. Not Zelda. Not Metroid. Not Star Fox. Not Xenoblade. Short of an unpredictable sleeper hit, sales will be on a steady decline from now on. It's past it's peak already, and they'll be preparing the new console with a better chance for success.

2. You're cherry picking. The N3DS will have new games you can't play on the OG 3DS.  The Wii U successor will do the same. Even if the Wii U successor will have more exclusives, the point remains that if you want those new games, you must to buy the new system to play them on.

3. I never said that it would be weak. What makes you think that shared architeture makes for weaker hardware. The Wii U is weaker than the competition by design. They didn't just stop one day and say "welp, that's all we can do. This architecture just isn't powerful enough." They were weighing the price vs. the performance, and then slapped a gamepad onto the thing. It's was as poweful as any new $250 console would be, and then they added $100 on top of that with the gamepad. If they set the price goal for the Wii U to be $400 without needing to factor in the gamepads price or the price for a bigger internal HD like with the PS4 and XBO, the Wii U would be the most powerful console on the market today.

Think about the type of games Nintendo makes. You think SM3DW is pushing the Wii U? Tropical Freeze? W101? Pikmin 3? Mario Kart 8? Smash? So many of the games Nintendo will always make are not pushing hardware from a gameplay perspecting. It's purely graphical. All those games can pretty much be scaled down graphically and play on the Wii with not many changes. Even something like Bayonetta 2 could, even though the Wii U is monumentally more powerful than the Wii.

Now think about all the games the Wii U's successor will have that are in similar situations. Sure they'd be scaled down and maybe lack some features, but that's what would prompt Wii U owners to upgrade sooner. The Wii U version would be like Smash 3DS, but upgrading to it's successor will make it the vastly superior Smash Wii U, and you'd only have to buy it once, and all your save data would be transferred because they'd literally be the same game just unlocking different features depending on which system you pop the disc into. 

I don't think 3rd parties are truly a factor for Nintendo anymore. If they truly are basing the successor's architecture on the Wii U, it most likely won't be x86, which still makes porting a financial issue, even if it truly is much more powerful than the PS4 and XBO. I'm betting on this new platform being Nintendo's first focused attempt at being truly self sufficient, much like what Disney has done. As for the PS5 and new Xbox, I honestly see neither of them releasing anything until winter 2020 at the earliest. The hardware may be obsolete way before then, but as long as they continue selling like they are, they'll be supported. So, even if the Wii U successor does get good 3rd party support, it'll have a comfortable amount of years before it needs to worry about becoming outdated again.

Again, it won't set any such expectation. No one thought the 360 would have a short lifespan just because the original Xbox did. The Wii U is selling abysmally, so it's reasonable to expect a shorter, yet still reasonable, lifespan. The console's successor will have a completely new chance at life with a huge market to tap into. If Nintendo does everything right, the way Microsoft did in marketing the 360, there's no reason it can't be a game changer for Nintendo. I think that anyone thinking that Sony's screw up was the only factor is seriously discrediting what Microsoft was able to acheive with the 360's commercial success.

The difference between the PS4 to XBO vs the Wii U to Wii U successor is that the NNID family with be built with the expressed focus of sharing a library. That makes it infinitely less complicated. The PS4 and XBO have completely different architecture from each other. They have similarities, sure, but they are not built to be coordinated with each other. You can't take a PS4 disk and pop it into an XBO and expect it to work. But you absolutely can take a PC game and play it on both a weaker and stronger PC, with varying results. Same with mobile games. If I play a mobile game on my iphone, and then play the same game on the ipad, I'm still playing the same game, but on more powerful hardware. That's what Nintendo want to do. While that focus will land primarily on the relationship between the new handheld and console, the Wii U will birth that relationship. It's basically the original iphone of this family of systems.

And even still, the PS4 and XBO are competing against each other. Those discrepancies matter. With the Wii U and it's successor, they don't. They aren't supposed to be the same. One version of the game is supposed to be the clear superior version. The Monster Hunter is an example. Smash Bros is another. You're supposed to look and say "I can keep my weaker hardware and still play the games, but I can buy the newer system and have better looking and performing versions of those same games." The difference in power between the 3DS and the Wii U is monumental, and yet they both have great versions of the newest Smash Bros.

Like I keep saying, most Nintendo games don't need to make full use of the hardware when it comes to features. Most of the games won't truly need the 8GB+ of ram that the new console may provide, just like the newest Smash Bros didn't truly need to be 1080p. It's just a perk you get from having the more powerful hardware that you'd be willingly buying out of by not upgrading yet. It's not that they'd have to adjust every game to work on the Wii U, but that most games will naturally by design be simple enough to need very little effort to get it to work fine on the Wii U, because that's simply the nature of most Nintendo games. And of course there will be titles that come along like Zelda U and X for the Wii U that just won't be possible on the weaker consoles, and those will just be full blown exclusives, just like Xenoblade on the N3DS. You say that games have to run properly on all platforms, when in actuality, only some games do. If they have a game that is too grand to be ported down to the Wii U or next handheld, they obviously just won't do it. I never said the library would be fully shared, but it'll be shared enough to make the transition easier than it has ever been.

Even your Ice Climbers point doesn't work. Smash 3DS is meant to support two living consoles. Wii U successor games won't be, so they won't need to make those kinds of sacrifices. Smash was trying to sell Wii U's and 3DS's. Games for the Wii U successor won't be trying to sell Wii U's at all. Even still, I'm sure that if the most significant omision in Smash because of weaker hardware is the Ice Climbers, the next consoles games will be fine, as the gap between it and the Wii U will naturally be much smaller than the gap between the 3DS and the Wii U. As far as third party games, they wouldn't care about parity between the versions when downscaling like Nintendo does. The versions on weaker hardware will either be worse, or not exist at all on those platforms.