Was Nintendo right to opt out of the graphics arms race?

[curl-6]

Soundwave said:

curl-6 said:

Wii U was a weird one in that it had a weak CPU due to using effectively three overclocked Gamecube/Wii cores for the purposes of backwards compatibility, and for some silly reason the hardware prioritised very low power usage despite being a dedicated console, so it was short on raw grunt.

On the flipside, it did alleviate the biggest bottleneck of PS3 and 360 by having more than twice as much RAM, which showed in games like Need for Speed Most Wanted where the Wii U version had better textures than the 7th gen twins.

It was very much a console in the Wii/Yokoi philosophy of "lateral thinking with withered technology", the problem was that unlike the Wii its central hook wasn't appealing to the mass market, and so it fell flat.

You can see with its successor that they pivoted more towards hardware that was quite capable and competitive for its time/form factor.

Yokoi philosophy is all over the place too and his reputation as "father of the Game Boy" is actually more fantasy than truth. 

He didn't want to make the Game Boy a system with swappable cartridges like the Game Boy was, he wanted some weird disposable toy thing like the Game & Watch with far worse specs than the final Game Boy that would have swappable screens for different games and no 3rd party games (lmao) because he hated the Famicom console entirely. It was basically going to be Game & Watch 2 only you could change the games by changing these really cheap screen overlays. In fact he had to be yelled at in a huge fight with a co-worker at Nintendo at a fight to change his mind. 

The real father of the Game Boy is probably actually a gentleman at Nintendo named Satoru Okada who I believe yelled at Yokoi to stop being a dumb ass and basically forced him to adopt the idea of a portable (well) Famicom like system with swappable cartridges, 3rd parties, etc.  Yokoi hated the success of the Famicom because it undermined his past with the company (toys and Game & Watch) and also flat out refused to allow the system to be called something like Famicom Pocket, which would have made sense. 

Yokoi was then gone by 1995 from the company entirely after the Virtual Boy flop, so he never really even iterated on the Game Boy at all, by that time Nintendo was working on a very powerful Game Boy successor called Atlantis, it just never got down in price/size/battery life to release. 

The making of the Game Boy is actually fairly fascinating and probably not what people think. 

Wii-Wii U was just Nintendo chasing casual consumers, it's an unpredictable demographic so they hit once and then failed the next time terribly. Nothing too much more complicated than that. 

Yokoi may have been long gone by the Wii U days but his philosophy was still very influential in Nintendo long after he left, that being the use of cheap technology that hooks people through innovative concepts rather than being cutting edge.