Why would they spend time and money 'reducing bloat' when the competitors will not have the huge limitations on size?

A small HDD is going to cripple online games for the Wii significantly. Some of the higher end downloadable titles between XBLA and PSN are nearing 1GB, as well as most major pieces of DLC.

And downloadable games? Forget about it. You will not be able to download a single new or recent title and meet the cap. No Arkham City. No Assassin's Creed 3. Nothing. That will hurt the WiiU immensely.

Why would they spend time and money 'reducing bloat' when the competitors will not have the huge limitations on size?

A small HDD is going to cripple online games for the Wii significantly. Some of the higher end downloadable titles between XBLA and PSN are nearing 1GB, as well as most major pieces of DLC.

And downloadable games? Forget about it. You will not be able to download a single new or recent title and meet the cap. No Arkham City. No Assassin's Creed 3. Nothing. That will hurt the WiiU immensely.

Eh, I'll be able to

And it also keeps me from being locked into buying a proprietary drive, so that's nice

Nintendo's pushing downloadable retail titles on 3DS, which only comes with 2 GB packed in, surely they'll be able to get someone to follow their lead on Wii U, especially since the third parties will be mooching off Nintendo's server space for the cause

well, my question remains, to you or anyone who has had good experiences with good transfer rates.

What is something to buy?

You'll be able to, but you'll be in the small minority that will add an SD card or USB drive.

And that's the problem. If a developer gets feedback that, say, only 2 in 10 WiiU users have add-on drives, then they'll know that the likelihood of their content selling well is going to be very, very poor.

Look at the developers that utilize any perpherial piece of hardware among any console - Wii's balance board, Kinect, Move, and so on. Very few utilized any of those devices, despite the fact that many sold very well. The likelihood of users purchasing SD/USB hard drives is arguably less likely than those devices. So think of the likelihood that a developer is going to utilize Nintendo's download services, knowing that, say, there are only a few users that will likely have the space available for their content.

Mark my words. Nintendo will suffer for it immensely. The AAA publishers are going to back away from developing tentpole DLC as fast as they can when they get the sales numbers for their 1GB+ content packs.

You'll pardon me for being unconvinced.

I think you would be surprised how low the percentage of any console userbase that buys DLC is, and that includes the 360. I don't have the number of 4GB consoles sold over the past couple of years, but somebody on the site might...?

And "tentpole" DLC isn't really the question, because exclusive DLC has never been shown to be a significant mover of software, much less hardware. Availability of identical DLC will be enough, and that's all that will matter.

You are pretending that this is a much larger investment on the part of developers than it is.

Tentpole DLC as in DLC that ha key component of a titles' deployment strategy. For example: Call of Duty, Fallout, Battlefield, Mass Effect 3, and so on. Titles that release 3+ pieces of content. If these developers don't sell a lot of DLC on the WiiU, its likely that they won't promote/release it, which will significantly degrade sales of said series on the WiiU, and hurt the overall userbase of the WiiU.

For AAA titles, you see attach rates between 25-35% for very successful content. That's before you factor in users that do not have online. Titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops sell over one piece of content for every retail unit sold. That is a lot of rolling the dice to assume that users will have sufficient memory space for the content on the WiiU, hence my believe that the WiiU will be hurt in the long run. Analysts will factor this into their ROI projections, and it will not be favorable for WiiU.

Also, I am assuming that Nintendo keeps the WiiU for more than 3 years at market. As the next generation goes on, online content will more and more prominent. F2P games will become start shining next generation, and that will put Nintendo in a very precarious situation, as there is no way that an 8GB HDD will be able to store sufficient content for such a system.

For the sake of my curiosity, would you mind citing those numbers?

Regardless. Mrstickball.

I don't know how much you know baout retail culture

(I'm an expert)

But do you know what people do when they realize that they don't have the space necessary for the content they want? Keep in mind, this is primarily about 360 owners, since the majority of 360s I sell are 4GB and when people come back about memory upgrades it's always about DLC. Do you know what they do? They come in, asking me how much money they have to spend to play some DLC.

You can get an SD card, right now, at a going rate of about 1GB=$1. External hard drives are hilariously cheaper.

If people want the DLC, they will set themselves up to be able to buy the DLC. It's that simple. When people desire content, really desire content, they will do quite a bit in order to get it.

Wii's internal memory will have nothing to do with it in the long run. The question will be if publishers create an array of DLC that customers will actually want. In the end, that's all that is going to matter.

And please don't quote analysts at me, that is just dust on a stellar wind

Which numbers do you want me to cite? If you don't accept analysts, then what do you want? Nintendo doesn't release their figures. As for games themselves, Activision themselves stated that Call of Duty: Black Ops had over 20 million map packs sold in a year of being on market (source: http://www.joystiq.com/2011/11/09/call-of-duty-black-ops-has-moved-20-million-map-packs-to-date/)

That puts the attach rate of COD map packs at 1 pack per retail title sold, or greater.

Certainly, people will go out and buy an SD/USB to add on memory for content, but what you've done is called "Adding a step in the conversion funnel". That is, you're adding an additional step in a given process to get users to purchase something. In all web-based services, that is a very bad thing, because you lose users in the process.

I agree that SD cards are cheap - in fact, they are so cheap, I have no idea why Nintendo didn't put a larger card in the WiiU. That is my entire point. The more space that the WiiU has by default, the more likely a user is to download content. Nintendo earns a percentage of each piece of content sold, even if its third party. Therefore, any money spent on the cost of the card would be made up and then some by the user purchasing content. If Nintendo failed to do that, then they have two reasons:

1) They genuinely do not understand the online market and online user. This will be disasterous for them, because online components of next-gen consoles will be a huge factor for all companies.

2) They do understand the market, and are choosing to ignore it. This would mean that they do not believe that this market segment will be a key component of their user base. If that is the case, then they aren't anticipating many core users or titles to come to the WiiU, which is a huge problem.

As for the argument of "If people want DLC, they will go to any lengths to get it". That is very, very wrong. If that were true, then no publisher would bother with marketing, press releases, or anything to notify users of DLC, its availability, or work with online services to push and promote downloadable content. Additionally, there are tons of white papers/sources out there that will state time and time again that users are far more likely to purchase content, or purchase a downloadable title if they are aware of it. Self-discovery is very over-rated in the digital world, and marketing is still key. What does that mean in regards to memory? Not every user will go to great lengths to get content, such as buying an additional hard drive. You'll notice that every time the Xbox 360 had a major bundle with a big AAA game such as Call of Duty, they never bundled it with the 4GB model. Why? DLC. They knew the user would want that content. And as stated, we're going to see a huge shift in Microsoft back to having a default HDD, because they now have a method to recoup the costs of the hard drive via content.

Internal memory will be huge. Mark my words. I am willing to eat my own words if I'm wrong, but I am certain I will not be wrong about this. Both the next Xbox and Playstation will have more hard drive space available than the WiiU. Not by a small margin, but by dozens of times' more space. That will allow them to leverage that significantly to defeat Nintendo next generation.