Not so much that but rather the entire philosophy behind the Wii was related to expanding the conventional gaming audience through intuitive user interaction. Thsi is contrast with catering to only the small, though devout, core market that is more attracted to new gameplay expereinces enabled by more computational power.   The purpose for hiding the specs was merely to move the debat away from specs as the only means to enhance a new generation and concentrate on the intuitive input.

Hiding the specs solely for the purpose of not wanting to be upstaged by the PS3/X360 would make little sense given that one doesn't need to know the specs to understand the computational power differnce between them was vast.

That's why I said they could support it, but they probably didn't for technical reasons. If they did support it, they would need to support it in down-stepping (which is already employed with 1 padlet using lots of graphical resources, high-end graphics and not just some 2D map). Put in 2 padlets and the downstepping, though possible, might not be what Nintendo wants in their final product.

Just sayin'.

Wasn't GC the only console that Nintendo was actually loosing money on in its 1st year?

Yeah, they were loosing money because they had so much to spare their pockets were waaaay loose.

Whether they lost money on the cube in the 1st year or not, long run they made profit off it and its games.

BUT! To be fair, Nintendo made a lot of its gen 6 profits off the GBA and its games. Even so, the gamecube sold a lot of software. Top 3 tie-ratio systems:

Software Totals table (Cube isn't too far behind GBA or PSP given its userbase)

Its easier to have best tie-ratio system when you have the smallest userbase

It all depends on the type of victory. If it's a full victory like for the PS2, then no as the charts show. If it's a partial victory, like for Wii vs HD, then yes the tie-ratio will be lower.

But that doesn't change the point that the Cube profitted from a HW & SW standpoint, HW being the first case anyways. I brought up software because someone mentioned the game divisions performance and Nintendo's accounts for SW & HW, so the figures needed to be mentioned. But The cube went for something like 50$ loss-leading for a few months and jumped into profitability quite soon afterwards (as far as I know), so odds are that at 22Mil units sold, with margin made on most units sold, the Cube was profitable and very comparatively to the PS2 from a HW standpoint, despite being a more capable system.

Ultimately, it's all about timing and HW architecture and design. As of the Cube, and for the portable line since forever, Nintendo is good at using cheaper yet still performing hardware and make something potent with it, as it was with the Gekko processor and Flipper Graphics Chip. This far Sony hasn't been as good at it, but the Vita is a step in the right direction.

It could be true, maybe this time Ninty was avaricious even on duck tape.

They did launch at a loss of $9 per console but that only lasted during the launch quarter.  It was all profits after that.

I would term their approach as efficiency of design ...

If what we know about the Wii U hardware is true then Nintendo could have (probably) had prototype hardware built in 2008/2009 that was based on unmodified components. For the next 2 to 3 years they could have had demo-software to represent games running on their current iteration of the hardware, evaluated bottlenecks and limitations, and resolved them producing a newer revision of the hardware to be tested. They could cycle through this process dozens of times over the next several years until they had hardware that performed exactly how they wanted it to.

If done well, you end up with hardware that is inexpensive because it is (essentially) 3 or 4 year old hardware that performs as well as brand new hardware under the conditions you were evaluating. Of course, if you make poor assumptions your system will perform like 3 or 4 year old hardware under the conditions of certain games.

This is (of course) easiest to explain with fixed functionailty GPUs where Nintendo could assume that all games would use Bump-maps and built in support in the hardware, but it is still a viable approach with programmable hardware.

HappySquirrel, if Nintendo was able to achieve that with the Cube, and will pull it off with the WiiU (it's a certainty in my book), why didn't they do so with the Wii, why was it not minimally HD ready? If you want, I would love to make a thread on this and have you post there if you will, the topic really really interests me.

Had Nintendo had it HD ready, going with a Cube-like HW approach (capable yet affordable), gen 7 would have looked a hell of a lot different.

Let me know, and you know what, I'm going to make the thread right now.

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=141959