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Soundwave on 05 September 2015
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spemanig said:
Soundwave said:

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. 


And yet Nintendo says it's key. You can think what you personally want of it. It's staying. Not absorbing it 1:1 doesn't mean not absorbing it enough to retain BC. It's not sales short term, but sales long term. Its ecosystem. It's not having to rebuild a library from scratch when you already have hundreds of legacy games to build on from the Wii U and 3DS. That's what they're absorbing. And naturally that familiar architecture will help with the transition from developing for Wii U to developing for NX, but it will definitely not be as far off as you say..

I haven't seen that quote, would you care to point it out?

If they said that though ... well, if you're Sony you just have to laugh, comfortable knowing that you probably got it made with the PS5. Winning these console wars is pretty simple when you're dealing with "competetion" like that. Is it any wonder they are on pace to cruise to victory in 3/4 console gens virtually unimpeded?

The Wii U has a small library of games that most people don't give a shit about aside from the 12 million Nintendo fans who will buy the NX system no matter what. Making backwards compatibility a key priority is ass backwards thinking and it's part of the reason why the Wii U is gimped hardware wise today ... they got stuck using the shitty IBM CPU for example pretty much mostly because they wanted to retain backwards compatibility with the original Wii. A lot of good that did them. 

The funny thing is they probably are not even get a price break on that IBM CPU because they are the only company in the world dumb enough to use that dated tech in a mass market modern product. So they're probably paying similar price to Sony/MS to get much lower performance. But hey, right now like 5 people are enjoying some 8 year old Wii game on their Wii U, so I guess it was worth it.