mountaindewslave said:
you call it 'wishful thinking', but its just an extremely logical business decision. If Nintendo unified their platforms it would make pushing plenty of software out easier for them and also unite their fans and make for one awesome selling and successful console I feel like a lot of Nintendo fans these days feel a bit torn on whether to go the handheld route or the home console route (or both in some cases).
those rumors are interesting but I really think it would be more exciting if they have some sort of interconnectibality to their home and handheld NX systems. like not even necessarily a chip card game that could be read on both systems and scaled to higher graphical ability on the home version, but even just a connected online library (i.e. you can download the same games for handheld or home console to some degree and share the library between both home and handheld systems).
a united library would do wonders for Nintendo imo. they are literally the only first part gaming/hardware company that has to work that hard on BOTH fronts to push out lots of quality software. Sony does not do the same for the Vita that Nintendo has done for the 3DS (at least in the past, the software for the 3DS has been a bit dry lately) I will mention that if the home console NX is not coming out until the end of 2017 that if Nintendo wants to take the console market by storm then I would suggest they attempt to go for graphics CONSIDERABLY better than the PS4 /Xone. if the games only look marginally better then that is not going to sway gamers, especially when at that point there will most likely be talk of the next Sony system. anyway interesting rumors, makes you wonder what bits (if any) are accurate |
It appear extremely logical business decision, but really the only people it truly benefits is Nintendo's hardcore fans. For Nintendo, it means while they may be doubling down on their most hardcore fanbase, they're also limiting the money they can extract from them since these fans will no longer be buying two consoles and two copies of some of their multi-platform games.
They're also limiting their appeal to a wider audience because the handheld will undoubtedly be more expensive if it has to have a minimum power baseline to make console games also run well on the handheld, or conversely they'll have to severely underpower their home console to make games compatible with the handheld, making the home console's appeal even smaller than the Wii U's (hello Playstation TV). So really they have to choose between an expensive handheld and a unappealing home console in order to even make it feasible.
It's also not appealing to third party developers, because even if its just a matter of recompiling the code to work on one platform or another, it's still literally double the testing and there will still be system-specific issues that arise, making the NX more expensive to develop for than the PS4 or X1. They would have to support and test each hardware specification. So it's going to be hard to justify to them to make games on a platform that's more expensive and traditionally doesn't support third parties very well.
And sure, the potential market might be there between the 3DS and Wii U, but considering that the handheld market could very well be drying up considering the downward trend of all decidcated handheld video game sales, and pretty much no one buying a Wii U besides those that buy any hardware made by Nintendo, it seems like a rather poor choice to put your eggs in that basket.
But hey, let's say it succeed. Let's say the NX goes and sells 150 million consoles world wide. Nintendo is making hundreds of millions a year, everyone is happy. Now let's say the NX successor.... is now two seperate consoles again, because money. Imagine how well that will go over. Nintendo will be forced into hybrid consoles for that point onwards lest they feel their fans wrath.
No. Nintendo is not going to have one game for two consoles. It will more than likely be easier than ever to port games from one system to the other, but when you go into gamestop, there will be two different sections of games, side by side. They're going to have two consoles with similar hardware and two games that run seperately on those two consoles, and you'll probably buy one copy of each and think it'll be genius of Nintendo if they gave you a reason to only buy one, and wonder why they don't.
