Wii's 2 year resistance

[Bodhesatva]

Borkachev said:

Going without HD support was a very wise decision. Nintendo didn't have strong 3rd party support for a whole decade, if Wii games would cost about the same as 360/PS3 games in development, Nintendo would have had next to none 3rd party games at launch and in the following months. Also, the price of the Wii would have been higher and most people would have to pay for a feature they couldn't use.

Adding HD support--just HD--to a game would add virtually nothing to development costs. In a 3D game, it's a matter of tweaking a couple numbers in the code.

What it would have cost Nintendo to add this ability to the hardware is another question, but I find it hard to believe it could have been much. Shams mentions limitations in the frame buffer and the RAMDAC - is that all that's holding it back? What would an upgrade to those features, plus maybe a little extra memory and such to handle the extra strain, have cost?

Keep in mind that Nintendo is making a $50 profit on each Wii sold. They could have made these upgrades, kept the same price point, and almost certainly have still made a per-unit profit. Instead they neglected to add support for a home theatre centerpiece that will likely be in nearly every Wii owner's home by the end of the system's lifespan--support that would have dramatically improved the visual appeal of their machine. I call that a mistake.

Now, I say that with 20/20 hindsight. I get the feeling that Nintendo wasn't very confident in their machine before launch. They probably wanted to be able to swallow a major failure and still come out on top, and making a tidy profit on each unit is the way to do that. Maybe they expected to cut and run after 2 or 3 years, before HDTV really became the standard. Obviously they couldn't have expected the success they've had. But knowing what we know now, I say that they could have done it, and they should have.

I'm only talking about HD support, but to take that one step further now, can you imagine what the Wii might have been if they'd elected to lose $50 on each unit rather than earn $50? That extra cash could have turned the system into something nearly comparable to an Xbox 360. It couldn't have made the Wii any more successful than it is now, and it would have reduced Nintendo's profits a bit over the next few years, but from the gamer's perspective it would have been a huge boost. And they could have done it without charging us an extra dime for the console.

Now we're getting into specifics that it appears neither of us can answer with much certainty.

My personal estimate is that real HD support for the console would have bumped the price 100 dollars or more, making the price 300-350, not 250. Do you have math to prove otherwise? I'm certainly not suggesting that my knowledge is precise.