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Soundwave on 10 February 2015
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oniyide said:
Soundwave said:

I do wonder though, especially if Sony exists the portable handheld market, whether or not at least on the portable side they may feel like the time is right to return to a more cutting edge approach?

More like how they were back in the day with the Nintendo 64? All you heard about that back in the day was it's incredible Terminator 2/Jurassic Park SGI graphics, DOOM 64, Turok, Star Wars, etc. they really actually did bank on a pretty core audience for that early on.

Because right now, the casual/kid friendly side is really being cannibalized by tablets/smartphones, especially if Nintendo wants to maintain the $30-$40 software model, they may actually realize that the "bluer ocean" for handhelds may be a more hardcore device that really drives home the "you can't get this on your tablet" point home. 

That and marketing on Better Call Saul/Walking Dead for the N3DS launch kinda made me go "hmmm". Why the sudden interest in marketing towards adults? Testing the waters for something in the future, perhaps? 

Also interesting for the first time since like N64/early GCN days they made it a point to talk about system horsepower with the N3DS ads. Hmmm again. 

But nah I'm probably wrong. Nintendo probably doesn't have it in them to leave their "aim for kids first" safety blanket behind.

but can Ninty even make such a device and still have it AFFORDABLE. cause we know that people arent going to go in droves and pay for anything over 250 and if im being honest and i hate to admit this they are putting things on tablets and phones that are making me go "whoa"


Yes ... I think so. Keep in mind an iPad Retina mini with a super high resolution 8-inch display, 2GB RAM, and a pretty smoking A8 processor (which would destroy the Vita head to head) costs Apple maybe about $200-$250 to manufacture. 

It would be a bit of a challenge, but not impossible. 

First thing you have to do is have an affordable screen that's still of decent quality. So a 5.5-6 inch 1280x720 touch panel takes care of that, regular LCD (no fancy OLED or 3D screen or anything like that, you can always release an OLED or 3D screen version later in the lifecycle if its so important). Save some money here. 

You don't spend a lot on-board flash memory, let the user upgrade that via their own SD Card. You go for a cost effective CPU from ARM, something powerful but something that's common and will scale down in cost quickly with good power efficiency. 

The GPU is where you spend your money. Custom design. Power that bad boy up to the top. You splurge a little bit on RAM as well. But RAM scales down in cost relatively quickly too. You use regular RAM (like LPDDR4) too, nothing exotic or crazy. 

You sell for cost or at a small profit from day 1, but using more common components you can rest easy that the manufacturing cost will drop fairly quickly. 

If you're sharing the same processor/RAM components with your "console" you can order in even higher bulk and ask for a lower price (another reason to do the unified platform route).