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Soundwave on 05 September 2015
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spemanig said:
Soundwave said:

I think NX is a distinct platform from the Wii U. They're not going to use things like that outdated IBM architecture again as its killing their hardware margins.

They'll probably incorporate elements/design philosophies of the Wii U GPU and memory architecture into the NX, but not a literal chip swap that would allow for literal backwards comp. 

So those games would still have to be ported, though it shouldn't be such a huge pain in the ass to do it. Should be fairly simple. 


It won't be so distinct that it won't have BC. No platform meant to absorb the Wii U's architecture would be. Nintendo literally mentioned BC as the key way they retain consumers. It isn't going anywhere.

With BC, they won't have to port anything. You just buy the NX and the entire eshop library will be available to play and purchase from day one. Even more "simple."


Iwata said he didn't literally mean absorbing the Wii U's architecture 1:1. 

Backwards compaibility being the key to anything is laughable. It's one of the most over blown features that's held up by a vocal minority of fans on the internet. In reality (as we're seeing this gen) it has little to no bearing on actual sales and quite frankly I'd be surprised if even 10% of Wii U owners play Wii games on their Wii U for any significant period of time. The PS4 has no backwards compatibility whatsoever, yet it's crushing Nintendo and MS like they're nothing. 

NX having a similar design philosophy to the Wii U architecture will help Nintendo more in the sense of its developers don't have to start from ground zero with a completely new architecture and take like a year to come to grips with it if it already has similarities to the Wii U. That's what Iwata was talking about that every time they've changed consoles (with the exception of GCN to Wii) they had to deal with a completely different system architeture from what came before and there is an obvious learning curve that comes with that.