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Soundwave on 24 September 2015
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spemanig said:
Soundwave said:

Nintendo is not going to be making hardware in 7-8 years time if they do not make some radical changes. 

Backwards compatibility at the expense of hardware is an insane philosophy. 

MOST people don't want to play old games on their hardware period. If they did Wii U and 3DS should be selling a fuck ton better than they are. They're not. 

So if its just a minority portion of the userbase, I say "too bad, so sad". You want that feature that 80% of people don't use, then you can pay a little extra for it as far as I'm concerned. The majority of the userbase and the entire development community should not be saddled with crappier hardware because 10 people want to play an ancient Kirby game from the DS-era for 15 minutes. 

Even with a unified platform, which I do advocate for, I don't even think that is some silver magic bullet. They are still likely to lose marketshare overall even with that approach. Nintendo fans I think really are in denial about what's actually happening to Nintendo's market, particularily the handheld side of it. I think even Nintendo knows its really, really bad (which is why they caved to make smartphone games, something Nintendo fans overwhelmingly would have rejected, but they don't understand the business realities of what's happening). 

If there aren't 4-5 things about the NX that don't make you say "wow, I did not think Nintendo would ever do that" that's NOT a good thing. Nintendo fans needs to kinda understand here ... they cannot simply keep doing the same thing they are now. That's why I think the negative reaction to the Nikkei report saying NX will run Android apps for example is misguided. Nintendo *needs* to seriously look at ideas like that. 


They are making radical changes. An all digital "smart console" that is part of a unified platform is as radical as it gets, without being a bad idea. It wouldn't be at the expense of anything, because the console hardware they will have, that being a dual screen handheld and a console with a gamepad, are perfectly fine and even superior to configuration found in competing hardware, and since it'll be capably of porting DQ11, it clearly won't be sacrificing so much power that it won't get ports. All's well that ends well.

That line about people wanting less games on new hardware, which is what you're implying when you say that people don't want to play old games on new systems, is factually wrong. Steam is a triving platform primarily because it exists on hardware not limited by generations and is therefore able to have a library that transends generations, which is exactly what the NX will do with Nintendo games. The Wii U and 3DS had do start their VC libraries over from scratch. The NX won't be doing that. Not much more to say on that.

The unified platform, by itself, is definitely not a silver bullet. But everything Nintendo is putting together with the NX, with expanding it's brand through smartphones, multimedia coverage for its valuable IP, and the membership service, is most definitely going to result in a titanic resergence of Nintendo as a valuable brand, which will work wonders when they come out swinging next year with a new gaming platform that is unrestrained by the old definition of what it means to be a console. But that definition will be in reguards primarily to firmware, not hardware. I don't even think the NXDS will keep the "DS" name, but it will definitely keep the DS screens. Just like the Wii U isn't called the "Wii HDS," when that is really all it is.

And I'm not against the NX being able to run android. Never said it wouldn't, or it couldn't. I don't think that Nikkei article is accurate because I don't think Nintendo is letting Google take a peice of their profits from games made for their hardware, but I definitely think it would be a good idea to get those mobile guys making games for the NX primerily, and then porting down to mobile platforms, as opposed to the other way around. But again, I don't think it's happening because Nintendo likes having closed platforms. I personally don't see any issue with sharing those profits, but I definitely see Nintendo having that issue, which is why I think it's unlikely to be true. Nintendo are Apple, not Android.


Even with the "radical change" of the unified platform, I think they will still continue to bleed marketshare. I hope it doesn't happen but realistically ... this could get real ugly, real fast. It doesn't really change the kid who's now into playing games on the iPad from really saying "yeak OK, now I'll buy Nintendo because that was my problem with Nintendo, not enough Nintendo games". 

It will help them in some ways, but if they cannot stop the on going erosion of the portable market, they likely are done as a hardware market in a mainstream way. That's their bedrock, if that bedrock continues to crack, then everything they have as a hardware maker goes to shit. 

3DS is going to finish at 70 million probably, it may actually not even get to 70 the way its fizzling right now. And that's worrisome, but I could honestly see that going even lower next gen.

Hopefully not below 50 million, but can I say with any certainty that that won't happen? No. If anything the handheld market especially outside of Japan is in full free fall.  

Like I said I see it all the time when I travel for work at all the airport where you see dozens of kids playing on tablets/phones and like maybe once in a blue moon I see a 3DS. This isn't even a competetion anymore it's becoming a slaughter. These kids are nothing like 80s/90s/early 2000s kids, they are growing up with these mobile devices and they aren't going to give a shit about Nintendo dedicated hardware when they turn 12/13/14, just because Nintendo says they should. Even with Nintendo characters on iOS/Google ... I mean yeah you can get the "better" Pokemon on NX lets say, but that Pokemon iOS game does not look half-way bad at all. A lot of kids will just stay with the tablet/phone I think. 

The shipment totals for the 3DS for the last two fiscal years (8.63 million last year and a target of 7 million for this year) are really, really concerning they have not had handheld shipments that low since before Pokemon was created. 

It's not just Dragon Quest XI they need. If they can get other higher-end ports of even PS4 games like Kingdom Hearts 3, Resident Evil 2 REMake, MGSV, etc. that would help. That's why I think they should choose the most powerful chip they can, even if it means (likely) that they have to use a tablet form factor for thermal heat issues. They need all the NEW (actually relevant games to today's kids) games that they can get. If you have to rework your engine and jump through 50 hoops to get a game running on the NX portable, then we've seen that movie several times already and we know how that ends -- most developers won't even bother to try.