| Intrinsic said: The only problem with all you just said; is that those things are all one major firmware update away for Sony or MS who Nintendo are going to directly be competing with and who already have a much better footing in the digital space than Nintendo. This whole " modern console" thing, based on what you have said all boils down to its OS and digital policies. this isn't 2006 when apple reveled the iPhone and basically redefined a mobile smartphone market that was still virgin territory. What you are suggesting means Nintendo does something in an industry that has players already doing all those things in some shape or form and already with vastly larger fan bases that has taken years to build. No, if that is the direction Nintendo are going into, then it will make no difference what so ever. Everything you have said could be implemented within a week via a firmware update and a few policy changes. it will be a pity if Nintendo makes that the focus of their entire next gen strategy. They haven't even built up a respectable console network and its been over 13yrs since the introduction of XBL. There is nothing new about what you say Nintendo could focus on. And most importantly, there are other players in the same feild that are better suited, positioned and prepared to do all that and then some. |
No amount of firmware repackaging can do what an all digital unified platform can do. The whole gimmick stops working without the family of platforms, which is something Sony and Microsoft can't replicate.
I've already said this; Sony is looking to turn PS Now into their future proof platform. They won't need to go all digital because they'll go all streaming instead. Microsoft is going a similar way with XBL. Nintendo differenciates themselves from those futures by doing something the others can't - a reason to buy the hardware.
Apple's iPhone wasn't the first multimedia device or the first touch screen device or anything. It was just the first one to do it all well in a mainstream product. MS and Sony haven't done that and have not made hardware that can take advantage of that the way the NX will. When the Wii was successful, they the Move and Kinect were released to much less fanfair, because they were late to the party. They didn't revolutionize first, so their efforts didn't matter.
What do you think will happen if the NX turns out successful with this prediction. What? Are the PS4 and XBO suddenly going to ban physical media to force players to be all digital so that they can cultivate an environtment where they can actually take advantage of and provide a user experience around it? Of course not. That would be suicide. And because they can't do that, even after a hundred different firmware updates, those systems can never be what the NX will likely be. In order for this concept to work, their platforms would have to transend their hardware.
That's the purpose of an all digital platform. That's why the iPhone was so revolutionary. And that's why, if I'm right, the NX will be revolutionary. That doesn't mean that the PS4 and XBO will stop selling well, but it absolutely does mean that they will never be able to replicate the NX. You can't just "firmware update" that kind of thing. You can't just update your PS4, and suddenly your PS4 feels like nothing but a vessel for your real platform, the Playstation the brand.
With PS4, you're buying hardware. With XBO, you're buying hardware. With NX, you'll be joining a platform. Completely different philosophies, and one that must be at the heart of your hardware design to work. It's clearly not at the heart of those, and that's not a bad thing, but it's definitely not a rectifiable thing either.
And to say that an all digital, steam-like unified platform for consoles isn't new is comedy gold.
