| Jumpin said: Actually, sales DO matter on profit when you have a company the size of Nintendo with billions of USD cost in annual expenses which include salary, taxation, operating expenses, corporate expenses, utilities/machinery/travel/property, licensing, R&D, marketing, etc. Most of which was dedicated to their home console business, not handheld. It happened that handheld generated many times more revenue and was able to prop up the company while the home console business failed. For example, Nintendo's R&D for their home console business alone in 2004 was 180M USD (of a total of 191M USD that year), Gamecube cost 99$USD at retail, and sold 3.92M for the year - R&D alone is valued at HALF of the total Gamecube hardware revenue. Sorry, Gamecube was nowhere near profitable. |
They recouped allot of the Gamecube hardware R&D costs when they released the Wii which used the same hardware base.
AMD now covers allot of the R&D expense for chip design for consoles these days as well, no longer does it make sense for Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft to get chips designed from the ground up.
| h2ohno said: The other big thing they should have done was make the system more powerful, especially its CPU. There is no excuse for releasing a system with a CPU that weak in 2012. GPU, RAM, and bandwidth should have been improved as well, but the CPU was the biggest problem. The early 3rd party games would have fared much better if the CPU was up to snuff. Even if they still used the PowerPC architecture they should have been able to manage that. And with the money saved on the gamepad there'd be more financial leeway to improve the system's specs. |
The Wii did have it's Pro's when it came to the CPU though.
Being an out-order-design was a massive efficiency advantage that often goes un-mentioned.
Memory bandwidth was a big big issue, the 12.8GB/s of bandwidth for the system memory is laughable... The eDRAM and eSRAM did help mitigate that somewhat, but it required allot of extra developer effort to make the most of it.
Either way, overall the WiiU was more capable than the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 from a hardware standpoint, not generationaly better however... And the Switch is a big jump in hardware capability even on top of that.
| Cerebralbore101 said: Yes, exactly! Tried to achieve. The phrase "Tried to Achieve" implies that it failed to incorporate the functions of two devices. That would make it not a hybrid, in the same sense that a flying device that failed to fly is not a plane. |
The concept is there, it works, it is just limited, thus it is still a hybrid like the Switch.
Thus a plane "not flying" is not an accurate comparison that backs up your argument.
| Cerebralbore101 said: If I bought a washer with a dryer function and it failed to dry my clothes, it would be classed as a washer only. Yes, that's exactly my point. Wii U fails in it's portability functions on so many levels. It can't play the vast majority of Nintendo's portable IPs. It can't be taken outside of the house, which is the main point of a portable game system. I don't care if Wii U kind of sort of let's you play on the go. That's the same thing as a washer/dryer combo kind of sort of drying my clothes, but still leaving them damp. Wii U gets classified as a home console for the same reason our hypothetical washer/dryer combo gets classified as a washer. |
The types of games that run on the device doesn't make it portable or a fixed function... Making that argument entirely redundant.
I can take my WiiU outside and sit on the front lawn with the portable gamepad.
If the WiiU gets classified as a home console, then the Switch gets classified as a portable.
| Cerebralbore101 said: Switch is a better home console than Wii U. Switch as gotten a great many AAA PS4/XB1 games like Dragonball FighterZ, Witcher 3, Divinity, DragonQuest 11 etc. Despite the fact that both Wii U, and Switch will have spent the majority of their lives as contemporary to the PS4/XB1, Wii U has almost zero AAA XB1/PS4 games in its library. Hell, Switch arguably has a better library of AAA games than XB1! If I were to take my PS4 library, cut out the PS4 exclusives, and add in XB1 exclusives it would be smaller than my Switch collection. |
The Switch had better be a better home console, it's using more modern components, with better sales which has resulted in superior developer support.
The ports from the Xbox One and Playstation 4 has been fantastic, but I am not going to pretend that visually FighterZ, Witcher 3, Divinity is going to be the same experience, it's just not.
The WiiU was never going to get the Playstation 4 and Xbox One ports like the Switch, it's hardware feature set just wouldn't allow it, not to mention the sales were non-existent meaning there wasn't a business case for ports to start with.
| Cerebralbore101 said: That not all Switch devices are hybrids. Imagine the following argument... Man B: So? Vita TV can't leave the house. By your argument Vita isn't a portable! The existence of Vita TV has zero bearing on Man A's argument. The existence of Switch Lite has zero bearing on my argument. Both are irrelevant. |
The argument would thus become that the Vita TV isn't a portable. Thus not all Vita variants are portable devices.
Same thing with Switch, not all Switch consoles are hybrids.
| Cerebralbore101 said: That doesn't make any sense. If I'm using Switch in fixed console mode I'm outputting to my TV, not the portable display. So how would the portable display hide it's power deficiencies? |
It's very simple. Perceived Pixels Per Inch.
The smaller the display, the more difficult it is to discern minute details.
The larger, higher resolution displays tends to show off where the graphics quality of Switch titles falls short, most often it starts with resolution, then draw distances, anti-aliasing, texture filtering and so on.
Which is why in portable mode games can get away with only being 360P/480P where-as if you were to run that same resolution on a 75" TV... It would look like crap.
| Cerebralbore101 said: The WiiU released at a time when it was going up against the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, so for that it didn't do to bad, sadly Nintendo released it at a time when we were starting to talk about next-gen consoles, which it fell short of. Consoles need to be judged according to whatever other consoles they spend the majority of their lives prior to obsoletion next to. For example: PS2 should be judged by comparing it to GameCube and Xbox, since PS3 made it obsolete by November 2006. I know you are trying to talk from a hardware perspective, but hardware power is almost always a useless metric for the greatness of a game system. By your argument the OG Gameboy was a bad handheld system, because the GameGear had color screens. |
And the WiiU was dropped during the 7th gen...
You are right, the Gameboy was a terrible system from a hardware point, that LCD screen wasn't exactly the clearest of displays with significant ghosting and lack of a backlight... But as a Kid, I didn't give a shit, it was still amazing in the 80's.
| Cerebralbore101 said: You do recognize that the WiiU is "pseudo-portable" - Meaning it's a Hybrid of several console approaches. (Fixed and Portable.) Pseudo means to have the appearance of something, but not actually being the thing it is pretending to be. |
That is one definition.
The other is: "resembling or imitating."
| Cerebralbore101 said: What I would really like is for Nintendo 64 and Gamecube Virtual console on Switch! Yeah, how Nintendo hasn't managed to just keep the Wii VC up, active and updated is beyond me. At this point you should be able to play 100% of Nintendo owned games on Switch, no problem. Every last Nintendo game from NES to Wii U should at the very least be a digital download title on Switch. The only exception would be things that Nintendo no longer holds the rights to. |
I wouldn't say "no" to compilation cart each for NES/SNES/N64/Gamecube titles either, I am traveling to some of the most remote places of the world where there isn't any internet, so the Switch becomes an off-line only device.
| curl-6 said: Wii U's CPU (Espresso) was sacrificed on the altar of backwards compatibility and power consumption. In order for it to natively play Wii games they stuck with the exact same architecture, which dated back to the Gamecube, and in order to keep power use to a minimum they kept its clocks quite low. |
If they clocked the WiiU CPU to around 2.4Ghz, it would have been faster than the Xbox 360 tri-core 3.2Ghz CPU, the in-order-design and lots of cache would have helped tremendously in bolstering IPC.
Still, in saying that... Having such a conservative CPU has meant that porting games to Switch has been a super easy affair, because those ARM cores are far more capable.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
