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Chrizum on 29 March 2016
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spemanig said:
Chrizum said:
Nintendo has never really valued storage capacity. They'll probably have two models: a basic model with 16GB and a premium model with 64GB. It will be compatible with HDD's of course for more storage.

They've never had to. Now they have to.

Why?

Iyasu said:
Chrizum said:
Nintendo has never really valued storage capacity. They'll probably have two models: a basic model with 16GB and a premium model with 64GB. It will be compatible with HDD's of course for more storage.

I wouldn't necessarily agree to that. They value storage capacity, just not as highly as other things.

N64 they valued higher piracy protection + control over the media + loading times (cartridges) over storage space (CD)
GCN they valued higher piracy protection (proprietrary mini DVD)  over storage space + paying licensing fees (DVD)
Wii they valued higher piracy protection (proprietrary DVD) over storage space + paying Sony licensing fees (BluRay)
Wii U they valued higher piracy protection (proprietrary BluRay) over storage space + paying Sony licensing fees (BluRay)

So Nintendo so far tries to limit the costs for making games, by generating more sales through less piracy or saving the money for licensing fees.

HDDs weren't much of an issue previous to the Wii U for Nintendo.

Specifically concerning the Wii U:
Nintendo said that one of the design philosophies for the Wii U was to make a system that consumed little energy, so that mothers could be happier. 
Putting that into perspective, it made sense to use flash storage over a physical hdd. Flash storage consumes less watts, is smaller and produces less heat. Yet due to how expensive flash storage was/is I guess they could only afford a small drive (8GB and 32GB). 

After the Wii U Nintendo should have learned some lessons concerning the internal storage.
-consumers complained about the limited storage
-consumers bought the version with more storage
-3rd parties should have told them that they need more space by now

If Nintendo uses a SSD the space will be limited again, but they should be able to afford 128GB or 256 GB. I also highly doubt they will continue the two model strategy, because the basic pack Wii U didn't sell. But since 500 GB and 1TB HDDs are so cheap in comparison they should prefer those, except if they need the benefits of an SSD for the OS/console design.

Seems we agree with eachother, Nintendo values other stuff more than storage capacity. But I doubt that they learned any lessons, Nintendo does things their own way and they are much too stubborn to listen to any criticism.

SpokenTruth said:
Chrizum said:

Bare minimum sounds exactly like Nintendo's hardware philosophy. The Wii U had an 8GB model. Nintendo will never overdo something when it comes to hardware specifications. I guess I can see them do a 32GB basic model, but can't imagine them going any higher.

The 8 GB and 32 GB eMMC NAND chips used in the Wii U were upper-mid range in Samsung's capacity line up at the time Wii U was being designed.   8 GB is now their smallest capacity eMMC with 256 GB being the high end.   So for the same costs, they could use 64 GB to 128 GB.

Also, if they switch to Samsung's new V-NAND (which I suspect they are), capacity starts at 128 GB which is also preferable because the read speads go from 300 MB/s to 1500 MB/s (BGA format).  They are slightly bigger but use almost half as much energy (something Nintendo seems concerned with).  Price doesn't seem much different as SSD's using both technologies cost about the same.

The choice to go with Samsung flash memory speaks volumes. PS4 and Xbox One sport 500GB HDD's because Sony and Microsoft care more about storage (and thus, digital distribution) than reducing energy consumption etc.