Soundwave said:
I guess another way of doing it is what if Nintendo made a different console for different regional tastes?
I'm going say Nintendo chooses to be a little bold and uses AMD's 14nm FinFET process which is supposed to be firing on all cylinders by next year. So lets assume 70 GFLOPS/watt.
NX Pocket Handheld - 350 GFLOP. 960x540 4.88-inch LCD screen. $199.99. Standard Nintendo option, good for kids, people who want a DS/3DS successor. 3GB RAM. Cheap screen but does the job.
NX Mobile Console (Japan) - 600 GFLOP (on battery); 900 GFLOP (plugged in). New Console Concept. Has a 1280x720 7-inch LCD screen. Can stream wirelessly to the TV via HDMI receiver (sold separately). Form factor may look like a Wii U controller or maybe a Surface tablet (kickstand display, play with controller). Not designed for pockets, but easy enough to take in a bag or carry from room to room. 6GB RAM. - $299.99 MSRP
NX Home Console (US/EU Markets) - 2TFLOP console (@28 watts), 1TB internal HDD, your standard Nintendo console. Games run at the full 1080P resolution for TV. 8GB RAM. About the size of the OG Wii (no disc drive). $299.99 MSRP.
All three versions could be sold in all markets of course, just the focus in the US would be the home console, in Japan the mobile console is the console made for Japanese tastes, and you have the standard Nintendo portable option for the typical kid market, budget parent, and the gamer who values portability/pocket-ability.
The only thing is I don't think the NX Pocket would be able to run all games (though at 350GFLOPS for only 540p render is pretty beastly still), but it would be able to run most third party games with scaled down effects and probably all Nintendo games at the lowered resolution, plus virtual console games and perhaps Android app ports. Ideal for getting kids with budget strict parents into the NX ecosystem and playing Splatoon 2/Mario Maker 2.0/Dragon Quest XI, then later on they can start bugging mom/dad for one of the console versions.
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More of this complete and utter nonsense. Games don't just "scale" like you think they do. It's not like PC games where you can just make the game run decently in on a variety of hardware specs and just keep driving up the minimum requirements until the game runs okay. That is not how it works. The specs don't change. Video games cannot "just scale" on consoles. It never has and it never will.
But let's just assume it does.
Game engines still have to be optimized for each hardware spec, or mode. Every single one of them. Games have to be tested for each hardware spe, individually. Instead of each developer requiring one dev kit, they now need three. Now instead of taking an hour to make a simple adjustment and test it on PS4/XB1/Wii U, they need to test it on PS4/XB1/NXA/NXB/NXC/NXD Wonderful! Awesome. Now the developers need to spend even more time testing things before their code is submitted. Did I mention this process can happen hundreds of times per day? Or at least it did. You just took 1/2 hour to test to make sure your code didn't break the build and turned it into an hour-1.5 hour process. Never mind the added cost and time needed to test the game.
Do you ever want to see a third party game on a Nintendo console ever again? Because the cost of developing for all those different skus and modes drives development cost through the roof, and I do mean astronomically high.
This will never happen, unless you want the NX to fail harder than the Virtual Boy.
