| Soundwave said: I think the portable NX should be the main device. Because it kinda has to be. It's time for the portable to stop being the "little brother" business wise it has the vast majority of the userbase, so if Nintendo is going to make headway with developer support the portable needs to be the centerpiece of the unified platform equation. Make a powerful but sensibly designed portable, basically the PS4 of portables. That's the "sun" of your universe. Then you can have different console models "orbit" around that central pillar, and the graphics can optionally scale up and the console user can pick based on their specific tastes what they want.
NX needs to radically alter Nintendo's hardware setup though IMO and embrace new ideas. If it's just the same ol', same ol', (which I understand is what some Nintendo fans want every 5 years forever and ever and ever), it's not going to do well. Nintendo needs to question every aspect of their hardware design and the modern function of said designs, what worked in 1985 and 1995 and even 2005 doesn't neccessarily mean it works now and it sure as hell is not working in 2016. |
The OS is what should be the main part of the system, TBH the hardware is just the vessel in this equation. The notion that the handheld will hold back the home console is a false one, tbh and as I've said to you in our past discussions or debates developers can easily scale their games up and down to run on whatever hardware, provided it's within a certain ballpark.
The hypothetical NX console can just run a more demanding version of the same game, at a higher resolution, with better textures, geometry, maybe adjustments to shaders, etc.
As far as potential sales goes there are still a lot of gamers that are yet to buy a console. So far maybe a quarter of the potential console owners have bought one, a massive area of the market still exists for the taking and of course there are the handheld users, but it's possible that a Nintendo home console could have a sizeable chunk of those console buyers. Maybe NX console could even account for more than the 3DS level of sales this generation.
It all depends on what kinds of games Nintendo are going to make for NX, if they're going to have games that target the global 3rd party audience, along with their core established IP then the ability to also move 3rd party software could be there this gen and the 3rd party audience that are yet to go 8th gen could decide to buy NX console, instead of buying PS4 or XBox One.
Those games that haven't bought into the 8th gen are still waiting for a reason or reasons to do so, maybe they'll buy a PS4 because it has more big AAA exclusives, along with all of the 3rd party software and the smaller indie games compared to XBox One.
It's possible that with only one platform to make games for Nintendo will be able to match software line-ups with their competition pretty quickly, given the volume of games that 3DS and Wii U have had combined that seems pretty likely. This unified approach development would certainly free up resources to allow Nintendo the freedom to make more new IPs, instead of having to make multiple versions of a game for each system in a unique way.
In this equation the software becomes the focus, be it the games and the OS, hardware just allows for a flexible environment to evolve into. Focusing on the hardware isn't really needed to make this happen, because the hardware is already at a point where games can scale, you only need to look at how PC games can just add features that can run with better hardware. Provided Nintendo makes the experience pretty seamless between the two there's really no chance of this having any problems. If developers can make a game run across thousands of different hardware configurations, with different architectures and a single OS or even two, then they can easily make their games work on 2 hardware configurations and a single OS optimized for those 2 devices.
The easiest example to understand IMO is the PC ecosystem, only much less complicated and developers choose the graphical settings for the 2 platforms in it. That's what NX sounds like to me. That works and because NX is much less complicated, while also packing one architecture across both systems, it makes things even simpler.
