Can Both Playstation and Xbox Survive If Nintendo Makes A Console Comeback?

[MajorMalfunction]

Ljink96 said:

MajorMalfunction said:

Agreed, especially about the handheld market part. The thing that worries me is that Nintendo came into this generation completely unprepared for HD development, and that the last 2 years of the Wii's lifespan was pretty barren for 1st party content. 2007 - 2010 was great as a Wii owner (got it in 2007, when they were available again in Canada), but they didn't have much presence in the home console market in 2011 and 2012.

I don't blame Nintendo's current actions for everything though; the Wii U was a risky gambit from the get-go. It either succeeded like the Wii (revolutionized gaming and got away with being weaker, like the original Wii got away with being SD) or it failed as rendering technology advanced (partially resident textures/clipmapping/"MegaTextures", global illumination and physically-based rendering all come to mind). What worries me is that Nintendo is extremely successfun on their own terms, but when they are the ones in control, they're a fish out of water. If Nintendo isn't willing to stick it out with the Wii U, I don't see there being light at the end of the tunnel. It's not a PS3-like situation where all they have to do is cut the fat (Sony was losing a minimum of $300/sale of the launch SKU), cut the price and push out exculsives to recover their brand. It won't cost as much (say low $100 millions vs. billions), but the way forward isn't as clear. IMO, Nintendo either goes $249 companion console or they compete head-on with Sony and Microsoft. As the Wii U shows, there is no in-between.

The way I see it is, if Nintendo does decide to go head on in the home console market space, it better sell or their home consoles would be a lost cause.  Nintendo loves to make money, they aren't keen on losing it and that's how they've stayed afloat for so long. The guys know how to rake in the dough. But it's coming to a point where relevence is almost as important as sales. We're not at that point yet for Nintendo but I see us getting there soon. They need to make a console that fits the needs of ALL developers but with their own network, etc. ...I don't see it happening. Honestly, I think Nintendo going 3rd party for home consoles wouldn't be a half bad idea but Iwata knows best I guess.

Agreed, again. Burek posted about Nintendo's mobile venture on the first page. I see it in a much different light. Nintendo's mobile strategy, if profitable, could be used to subsidize their console business, instead of outright replacing it. I think at this point, relevence is as important as sales. Right now, with ~9.2 million sales after 9 quarters on the market, and poor 3rd party sales across the board, Nintendo has lost any sway it had with developers and retailers. A (some?) retailer(s) (Asda, in the UK, IIRC) stopped stocking the Wii U and 3rd party have basically abandoned the Wii U due to poor sales across the board. If we want to draw parallels to Sony's recovery of the PS3, we'd best turn our attention to the Xbox One. Both dropped unnecessary fluff (PS3: PS2 back-compat; XB1: manditory Kinect), boosted 1st party output, and fired the people responsible for the initial problem (PS3: "Crazy" Ken Kuturagi; XB1: Don Mattrick). Nintendo needed to panic, then course correct, and they didn't. At this point, I do not forsee the Wii U overtaking the GCN. If I was asked in 2013 or 2014, I'd say that they still have options. In 2015 and beyond? No, now, their competitors are too entrenched (30+ million sales between them), the Wii U is too "different" (see next part), and the PS4/XB1/PC ecosystem is too lucrative to give up.

On the second bolded, part of what Nintendo's problem is that they make hardware for themselves first and foremost. Sony and MS get 3rd party developers involved in their design process. MS reportedly added, in the 11th hour, 256 extra MB of RAM at Epic's behest (they had shown a prototype of Gears of War running with 256 and 512 MB of RAM). And on the software side, the software implementation of clipmapping devised by Carmack after reading this 1998 SGI paper on clipmapping (back on HW considerations, Rage used 1 thread to decompress JPEG -> DXT. It was a workable solution because the X360 CPU has 6 threads). AMD later implemented this in hardware under the name "partially resident textures." It was later added to the D3D 11.2 spec under yet another name ("tiled resources").