| Soundwave said: $149-$169 doesn't necessarily mean super cheap hardware. 800 GFLOPS + 3-4GB of RAM say ... for Nintendo would be a ton of raw horsepower to make their games with. Third parties won't support Nintendo that much anyway, so who cares. They haven't for 20 years now so it's not like this is some new development. |
That kind of a price point doesn't mean even remotely close to PS4 hardware in 2016, it does however likely mean a 3DS/Wii U hybrid box, in a smaller case than Wii U coming out in 2016.
I doubt this would be Nintendo's next home console, more like the unification of home and handheld platforms, into a single SOC, that can then be included in the 9th gen home console.
As far as 9th gen goes, unless Nintendo gets their share of the pie of 3rd party sales they are going to find gaining any part of the market difficult, even risk losing what little sales they currently have from hardware.
Sony has shown that gamers are more than willing to pay for reasonable specs if the price is right, a system that's capable of achieving good quality modern graphics, accessible to a very big audience of gamers.
There's no reason why Nintendo can't approach that with their next system a year prior to the release of the next Playstation, because all of the same technology Sony would use is available to all platform holders. Provided Nintendo makes platform exclusive games that appeal to the 3rd party audience they can] claw back a better market share and indies have shown that developing those kinds of games doens't have to be expensive, it just requires good, universally usable tools (which are clearly available to everyone now) and creative thinking in how you approach developing games (techniques being pioneered by many modern developers).
3rd parties would definitely support Nintendo, if they felt Nintendo were worth supporting, but Nintendo needs to work to get that back, they need to prove that they have an audience on their system that will buy 3rd party games, which was lost with poor hardware choices when Nintendo made N64 and decided to stick with cartridges, instead of going with bigger media storage and not think about the costs to publishers.
Gamecube was a similar deal with it's propritary discs (not so costly, but still lacking in storage compared to DVD), again Nintendo lacked games that appealed to the wider audience too.
If Nintendo just approaches 3rd party, asks them what hardware they want in their next platform, start investing in more western focused games and plan to have a bunch of titles to release steadily from release in 2017 or 2018 when they release, along with developing tools in conjunction with 3rd party to make development easy across the board, maybe joining Khronos Vulkan if they haven't already then they could set themselves up in a good place to appeal to more external publishers in the future.
