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elektranine on 02 April 2016
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jason1637 said:
elektranine said:

Yes let's look at the Wii, let's look at the Wii:

The was released and sold well for a period of time and then didn't sell nearly as well. There was a mass hysteria surrounding the Wii propelled by the media, such as CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC, etc, promoting it as a "must have" device. Basically it was cool to own one. Many non-gamers bought this device just because their friends had ones. Nintendo reported alarming statistics such as less than 40% of Wiis were ever connected to the internet and very low software attach rates.

This obviously didn't happen with the Wii U and almost certainly won't happen with the NX either. Besides I don't think anybody wants another Wii with its low attach rates it failed to attract much hardcore games from developers and what was on there were poorly designed motion controls ala 3rd party shovelware.

 

Besides the main premise of this thread is to discuss the R&D costs of the NX. Many say the NX is supposed to be more powerful than the PS4 but with such low R&D Costa it likely will not. See my above post on how people are overstating Nintendo's true console R&D costs.

Dude the Wiis attach rate is actually higjet than the wii u.

Also the ps4 came out in 2013. Im sure Nintendo doesnt need to spend that much to make a console more powerful.

Ah yes the oft repeated yet incorrect theory that Nintendo can just stick off the shelf parts in the NX and be more powerful.

Ask yourself this, why 29 months later can you still not buy an APU more powerful than the PS4's APU?

The PS4's APU is a fully custom chip the result of years of R&D by SCE's engineers and AMD's engineers with billions in R&D costs all fronted by SCE. The PS4 APU cost less than $50 at launch to manufacture yet AMD still has not released a APU coming even remotely close to that APU in terms of power.

Surely AMD would have released that chip on PC had they been legally able to do so. It would had a pretty capable chip to go after PC gamers with and since its cheap to make they could have priced it at $100-$150 and still made a killing. However that never happened and never will happen.

The custom chip that SCE and AMD co-developed is the property of SCE and they have the exclusive rights over it. AMD can't use any knowledge from the development of the PS4 APU in any other projects. They are legally bound by contract and NDA. That's why we still do not know the PS4's CPU clock speed and there are still key technologies implemented in the PS4 APU that are missing from AMD's retail APUs and GPUs. SCE went to AMD and contracted them to provide a reference design and to work with them to heavily customize that tech. 

This is why Nintendo has to pay big bucks to beat the PS4. They have to go to AMD and pay the R&D costs to develop a new better APU, as AMD legally cannot use any knowledge they learned from SCE. Or they have to go with a discreete CPU/GPU combo but that would still be constly and drastically increase the cost of the NX console. The thrid option would be to pick an existing retail APU and customize it to their liking but that would still be less powerful the the PS4 but maybe more than the xbone.