Pachter Believes The Nintendo NX Will Cost Around $299

[Cloudman]

spemanig said:

Cloudman said:

I dunno, there has been quite a bit of uproar for some of this, especially amiibo, and for good reason. Deliberating holding back hefty amount of extras and holding it to one version sounds really anti-consumer, which seems like Ninten would not want to do?

Though how would Nintendo even do that? There wouldn't be different versions, as they would work on either console...

Oh yeah, of course there it an uproar. I'm apart of it, but even I know that it's completely muted by the runaway success over Amiibo. There is no such significant uproar at all over what Smash and HWL did, however. Not enough to change anything, and I'm sure the same will happen with the NX. People will complain about it, because it's wrong, but that won't change anything, because it will work.

Nintendo does anti-consumer shit all the time. Like I said, Amiibo is exponentially worse than this is, and Amiibo are being put into more games every day. The entire way Nintendo handled Smash's DLC is anti consumer. Nintendo are no saints. This, by comparison, is absolutely nothing.

They will be different versions, just based of the same baseline game. They will just be extremely similar, from a skeliton POV. They can't be exactly the same simply based on obvious things like screen real-estate, game sizes, optimizations, etc. The HUD in some games, for example, must be different on the NXDS than it will be on the NX because of the nature of a smaller screen. That can't be done with 100% identical versions. Then comes the fact that more work will need to be done than a simple scaling up or down. The hardware is set, meaning there will need to be optimizations done to get the best out of the power given. They'd also need to do some serious compression for all of the NXDS versions of the game files, because a handheld simply does not have the capacity to hold that many console-sized games, space wise.

All a unified platform does is make it fast, easy, and cheap for the developer to do all this. Adding exclusive content to either platform merely requires telling the game what platform what content can appear on, the same way it will already do it for the versions of a game itself. That's why people thinking this will be a physical platform are legitimately nuts to me: especially carts. This kind of stuff isn't happening with cartriges. You aren't going to buy a cart, have it work onboth, and see the same kinds of differences you expect between a console and a handheld when you swap that one cart between the two. 

I don't think the amiibo are all that bad. In some cases, it is, but most of the time, it is minor extras that people won't miss, and people mostly want the figurines as collectibles and just decoration, at least for me. I have never bought an amiibo just for the extras they unlock. The best case scenario would be they just released amiibo w/out anything attatched, but I see there is some creative idea around the amiibo concept, but just hasn't really be done yet. The best examples are Smash Bros and Ultra Smash Tennis.

I suppose they can make it so that the game will recognize which console the game is being played on, but I don't quite see them going to that extremes with the NX. I think the only reason the HWL  is having this weird content exchange thing is that HWL is releasing so late and it needs something to make it worth while. I don't really see games releasing on different dates for specific consoles since it would be playable on both from the start.

I also heard flash memory being thrown around as a possible thing to use to hold games in, besides the NX being digital only. Though I really don't know that much about the current info on NX...

Also, how is Smash bros DLC anti consumer? It seems like standard dlc, just over priced.