Soundwave said:
Yamauchi is the one who negotiated the component deals though. He would never let Nintendo use such exotic, expensive hardware (for little to no gain). The SGI chip in the N64 I think upset Nintendo's designers to the point where they insisted all consoles after that had to be made to their needs, the problem with that is it's prohibitively expensive when you make odd/bizarre design decisions. Iwata needs to clamp down and assert authority over his devs, but I get the sense at Nintendo he doesn't have the authority to do that and has to go along with the opinions of like 5-6 other people. Nintendo's developers are great. They'd make a fun game on any architecture, they need to be reigned in and made to understand that it can't be all about them. The company is being hurt by a lot of stupid design fetish-fulfilment on the part of their designers rather than making more sensible, cost-effective (and even performance effective) decisions. Nintendo could've used a more off the shelf AMD GPU for Wii U for example and likely gotten a considerably more powerful GPU, but too much focus on the wrong priorities. Backwards compatibility with the Wii was a big mistake too, it basically shackled Nintendo to the ancient PowerPC architecture that they can't redesign or renegotiate (most likely) on price right now. |
Lately Nintendo has put in features, both in consoles and handhelds, that are not used at all or very poorly (second screen, 3D, NFC, TWiii). It is as every new idea they have at brainstorms should be realized in the hardware, but then they do not have the tenacity to fulfill the features possibilities.
