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Soundwave on 11 September 2015
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forethought14 said:
Soundwave said:


If the portable is near/equal to the Wii U, I think will be fine for Nintendo if the console is basically just the same games in 1080P. If some devs want to go beyond that and add other effects, that would be their perrogative. 

Nintendo's consoles have dug their own grave, only the Wii has been truly a success in the past 15-20 years and that was again largely off the back of cheap casual games not big epic titles. Nintendo can't afford to keep their best franchises away from where 80% of their existing audience is, right now they're selling games like Splatoon and Mario Maker to a niche 10 million group of people that like playing Nintendo games on their TV, and that's an insanely stupid business model which they probably are very keen to change. 

I don't think Nintendo really has any huge interest in making today's "epic" games anyway, I don't think they're looking at Uncharted and saying "wow, we should be making games like that". 3D Zelda is really their only hugely epic franchise from a budget/scale POV and that looks great on existing Wii U tech as is. 

And no, I was never talking about two completely distinct architectures. 

I honestly don't think Nintendo will be okay with low-level physics, AI, etc on a Console. Those things won't change with resolution.

So you think they should just give up? The point of a Console according to them, is to offer an experience that can only be experience on their console. They screwed up on Wii U, they've screwed up some of their consoles; therefore they should just give up? I doubt they'll give up trying to " innovate"

I'm not saying they should make an Uncharted; however a difference in power does open up new possibilities, as we've seen with Wii U. I doubt they'd want to break away from that.


They can still make the occassional wacky/"innovative" game that can only function with a console controller. A lot of people may have thought the Wii was giving up too, Nintendo abandoning competing with Sony/MS to recycle the GameCube for a motion controller. 

They can't continue on the way they are now. Approximately 300 GFLOPS is plenty for physics and AI even on a portable platform particularily for the games Nintendo makes. 

The fact is their last remaining strong hold, the portable market is also under attack. They can't afford to have their software library split between two platforms any longer, this is like an army that's suffering heavy losses trying to hold two fronts. 

Beyond that it's not "giving up" to acknowledge you can't support two high-end platforms at once. That's just accepting reality. Supporting the Wii/DS is one thing when development costs of those platforms was low, but they can't even hack it with a PS3-level console and a PS2-level handheld today. This is supposed to magically get better with a PS4-level console and a Vita++ level handheld? 

Yeah no. Nintendo also says a lot of things, like how they'll never make smartphone games. Sony wouldn't be able to support two platforms like that at once either, the PS4 is like almost 3 years old and it feels like just now is Sony finally "warming up" with their development teams. There's no chance Nintendo could juggle that while also having to make several high end handheld games per year on top of that. 

And yes, the one thing people don't talk about right now is that quite frankly it's terrible business to have your highest end/most expensive games only available to 20% of your fanbase. 80% of Nintendo hardware buyers this gen won't be playing Splatoon, Mario 3D World, Legend of Zelda U, Mario Maker, or Mario Kart 8. That just isn't smart business any way you spin it and it has to change.