Okay, so my question to you is:

1. What about foresight. What about HD did they not believe in for it to be, 3-5 years down the road, ubiquitous. How much would a preventive measure costed to actually offer an HDMI port, in all realism. What would have been the cost?

2. If the X360, launched in late 2005 pulled off high-end graphics with higher texture resolution, shaders and poly counts, was cost the real question. How much did Wii launch at 280$? How much profit were they making on each unit and didn't the cube launch at a similar price? Why the change in HW strategy? I can understand a change in marketing strategy and only focusing on casual SW, that's fine, but why not leave the door open for 3rd parties if they so needed, did Nintendo not believe in its own success and foresee Sony's possible flop at launch? This was 7 years ago, our mindsets were very different as to manufacturer position in the industry at the time.

1. This would only be good foresight if 2 could be applied feasibly.

2. Wii launched at $250 and supposedly $30 of that went toward Wii Sports (remember it was sold sperately in Japan where the Wii launched for ~$212).  Don't forget you received a Wii remote adn nun-chuck.  Another $40 or so in costs.   Profit was decent at launch ($20-$30 if I had to guess...there are no figures on this).  GC launched at $199.  Actually, no, they didn't foresee their own success.  They've alluded to that many times.  Keep in mind the X360 took major losses on that hardware and had major hardware flaws along with it.  It wasn't until just a year or so ago that they were finally ironed out.  

The costs associated with increasing the capability of the Wii to ensure adequated HD rendering (this means texture resolutions, polygon counts, shader operations, etc...) would have taken the Wii either way out of profitabilty range or priced far higher than what the market would have accpeted.  Another factor was 100% backwards compatability with the Gamecube.   That would been insanely difficult or insanely expensive if they changed architectures (as would be required at the time) to compete directly on horsepower

Don't forget that one of the factors going into developing the Wii was to give 3rd parties a cheaper development alternative to the expensive to develop for HD consoles.   Making the Wii just as powerful would have removed that option for 3rd parties.

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.

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

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.

THE WII MICRO!

(thats the controller, it plays only virtual console games, because retro games are so cool and shit) 

JEEZ REGGIE HAS A SERIOUS A** FACE! HE TAKES HIS GAMING SERIOUSLY!

Honestly, I don't know the internals of Nintendo's decision making process but I suspect Nintendo changed hardware strategy with the Wii in order to manage risk. The R&D and licensing costs of producing a new system from scratch are hundreds of millions of dollars (and in some cases billions of dollars), and the manufacturing costs would be substantially higher. Beyond that, the development costs of making a game that took advantage of high end hardware would be substantially higher.

Ultimately, I think Nintendo was worried that they would have billions of dollars invested in hardware (R&D, Licensing, and inventory) and billions of dollars invested in software and their system would fail in the market. By releasing the Wii as they did, they minimized this risk ...