NX power

[Soundwave]

potato_hamster said:

Soundwave said:

Even assuming Nintendo suffers more market contraction next cycle, which is highly possible, all the more reason to have a unified platform in that case so you don't get stuck with things like the next Zelda and Splatoon 2 and Mario Kart 9 or 10 selling to only a small chunk of your actual hardware base.

Lets say their portable line continues to suffer a bit at the handhelds of mobile/tablet and contracts to say 50 million down from about 68-70 million this cycle, then the console more or less is the same 15 million or so, that's still 65 million hardware units ... enough that you would want all your games to be available to all your buyers. Segregating software is just costing Nintendo money at this stage since they don't make much/any profit from hardware to begin with. 

Having to pay $500 just to play all the Nintendo games is a losing proposition too, even most Nintendo fans choose not to do that (those who own both the 3DS and Wii U are the small minority). The only thing a segregated library is good for at this point is keeping games like Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon and Bayonetta 2 locked off from selling to the 80% majority of the Nintendo user base. A game like DKC: Tropical Freeze is such a shame ... could have sold 2x-3x more easily I think, it just happened to be stuck on the Wii U and that's rough. 

If you really think that's Nintendo's best play - to take their ball, go build their own playground, put up huge walls around it, and sustain themselves off of the dwindling number of Nintendo fans until it becomes unsustainable, but what then? How is that really growing their business? They're just finding ways to leverage more money out of their existing fans.

Tell me this, how is an NX portable more appealing than a 3DS to a potential buyer? Because they're missing out on the Wii U-style games that they may or may not be interested in? I'm failing to see that as a reason to spend $100 more on a new platform.

There isn't an alternative play IMO. 

What you want is a magic PS4 competitor with a distinct library, and then I suppose the handheld is what? Like a PS3 level (because that can't just stay at the 3DS tier either). 

So OK, now you have two discreet platform that Nintendo has to somehow primarily support on their own. Japanese developers will support the handheld but probably pass on the console, just like they don't suppor the Wii U. 

Western developers will never give a shit about Nintendo. That's more the REALITY of the situation. Even putting aside the fact that the PS4/XB1 will have a three year head start at minimum, the fact is all these lovely "third party killer apps" really means hyper violent action games and sports games from Western developers, a genre type that doesn't fit very well with Nintendo's Disney-styled content. 

So unless Nintendo betrays what they are as a company and starts making Uncharted/COD knock offs and dramatically tones down the Marios/Yoshis/Kirbys/etc. of the world they'll always be labelled the kids company any time they try to directly compete against the Sony/MS. 

You'll have the predictable situation where Madden NFL or Call of Duty will come out and the PS4 version will sell 1 million+ opening month, the XB1 at 800k, and the NX version will probably be way down at 80,000. And then the excuses will start from developers predictably about how they can't put as much effort into the NX version or how this year they're skipping the NX because of demographic issues, blah, blah, blah. 

Nintendo IS their own unique part of the market for better or worse, denying it doesn't magically change it. 

Also who says Nintendo would mandate completely seperate builds for each game? More likely how it'll actually work is a developer who doesn't want to make two different versions can just go ahead and target the portable spec and then if they want they can make the game run at a higher resolution for the console spec and that can be the only real difference.