Why I think Nintendo Switch is set for another Wii U disaster.

[Pemalite]

oniyide said:

@bolded, hell you couldve said the same thing since N64

The NES and SNES were competitive with the competition during their reign.
The Nintendo 64 was the most powerful console of it's generation.
The Gamecube was right in the middle, but was also competitive with the Original Xbox when programmed it's way, in-fact the Gamecube could do almost everything the original Xbox can, despite it's fixed-function hardware.

The Wii and Wii U were not competitive with the competition. The Wii's life was short, it was ignored by multiplats. And the Wii U bombed.

Kai_Mao said:

I don't know much about actual game development (let alone producing games from first party studios) so I don't know how much cheaper it would be to make Uncharted 4 compared to Pokemon Sun and Moon. I'd assume games in general get more expensive to make as hardware becomes more powerful. HD development gave Nintendo trouble this gen due to higher costs and production time, thus the delays and all that fun stuff.

To a point. Yes. Better graphics *can* make game development more expensive.
But some graphics effects do the opposite and make development faster, simpler and cheaper.

High-Definition or "HD" for example doesn't actually increase development costs at all. It's just the resolution the game renders at, Nintendo was inaccurate in the way they worded it, most probably trying to dumb down their rhetoric for non-tech orientated people.

When a developer is forced to push the hardware to realise their vision, costs can skyrocket, especially if they are building the game to the metal or low-level application programming interface.
Also having non-standard hardware like PowerPC can also increase costs, which is why Developers were so happy when the Xbox One and Playstation 4 launched with x86.

The Wii U suffered from a multiple of those cost issues, it was PowerPC, it was low-powered so developers needed more R&D time to get the most out of it... You saw the effect with some Wii U ports that were lazily/cheaply done and the erratic performance they had right? Wouldn't have been an issue if the hardware was faster or they spent more time and money on optimizing the games.