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bonzobanana on 23 May 2015
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padib said:
bonzobanana said:

I'm not sure that sounds like a successful commercial product. It sounds like something that could destroy Nintendo commercially by damaging their handheld market with a confusing product line. I don't understand a lot of Nintendo's recent decisions and understand this less than the wii u. I realise we haven't seen the full concept yet but there is a lot of underpowered hardware about now. Many tablets provide hugely more power than the old and new 3DS and yet cost a fraction of the price. There is now so much under-powered hardware about I feel nowadays a home console has to justify itself by being reasonably powerful and with a range of exclusive software. Nintendo like selling cheap under-powered hardware at huge profits and this looks like another attempt to find someway of selling rubbish hardware. If there is a handheld system that can run the same software then clearly the home console part is going to be seriously weak even if its got a few extra bells and whistles. 

Nintendo just need to launch a decent home console in the mid-generation position away from Playstation and Xbox launches ensuring it is at least a bit more powerful than those systems so can get a couple of years under its belt as the most powerful system with the best looking games and more importantly Nintendo exclusives. 

At this point I'm thinking Nintendo may have to bow out of home console hardware in the near future and perhaps if they do serious damage to their handheld business perhaps hardware altogether. We shall see how it unfolds but amazing games sell hardware but such software is difficult to create on low performance hardware.

On the contrary, the NX is meant to solve that problem by offering more powerful hardware for gamers who want more, and less powerful hardware for gamers who want to pay less. They will have higher loading times, but will pay for a cheaper console. You will basically get what you pay for, which is excellent in my view.

For those who get the premium console, they will get all the graphical advantages which warrant the higher pricepoint.

No doom, no gloom. Just tons of games and tons of options.


Now that you put it that way it sounds a bit more interesting. How many levels of performance are there do you think? is it something like this;

Weak home console / handheld - Tier 1

mid-level home console / high level handheld - Tier 2

high performance console - Tier 3

High performance console with large HDD - Tier 4

Immediately makes you think of PC and I'm sure windows handheld consoles are coming. We already have windows 8 tablets where you can install steam and run your games at very low prices with low settings.

It still has the whiff of failure about it to me and Nintendo pricing is always excessive high.  Also why invest in such a format especially the high end products when Nintendo gets such weak support normally. It may be that NX does well as a handheld but their home console versions sell terribly so what is the incentive for Nintendo to enhance the few games available?

Also if at its heart is a game with a game engine that runs on humble hardware then really all you are going to get is handheld games with upscaled more detailed graphics. This is similar to the wii u situation which can't even match ps3 or 360 for the game engine. If its not cut down on wii u it ends up with lower frame rates. It's only where the game requires low cpu resources does the wii u excel either because its a type of game that doesn't need much cpu power (racing, 2D etc) or the game is written from the ground up for wii u and lowers cpu requirements.

It will be interesting to see what NX really is but I've a feeling at the moment that Nintendo will be exiting the home console business soon and just concentrating on handhelds.