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Forums - Gaming - Did Nintendo Miss Their Opportunity By Undercooking the Wii U's Specs?

megaman79 on 24 November 2012

I think you guys are forgetting that Nintendo isn't competing with Sony and MS as much as Apple and the IPad.

In that respect its got to be cheaper, regardless of the arguments in favor of a technical war.



“When we make some new announcement and if there is no positive initial reaction from the market, I try to think of it as a good sign because that can be interpreted as people reacting to something groundbreaking. ...if the employees were always minding themselves to do whatever the market is requiring at any moment, and if they were always focusing on something we can sell right now for the short term, it would be very limiting. We are trying to think outside the box.” - Satoru Iwata - This is why corporate multinationals will never truly understand, or risk doing, what Nintendo does.

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Roma on 24 November 2012

honestly it doesn't matter what Nintendo does. people and devs will always find thing to complain about. lets wait and see the sales and what it can do further down the road.



    R.I.P Mr Iwata :'(

DanneSandin on 24 November 2012
Soundwave said:

In a way, I think Nintendo really let Sony and Microsoft off the hook here to be honest.

They're both very late with 360/PS3 successors because the last console cycle took so much out of both of them early on that they need these later years to milk profit from aging platforms.

Nintendo made a ton of money off Wii, they really could've screwed Sony especially IMO with a system that was reasonably more powerful than the current HD twins without getting too ridiculous in cost. 

Sure maybe Durango/Orbis would be more powerful still in a year, but in that case, I think a lot of devs would look at the Wii U and say "y'know this platform is a good leap above the PS3/360 and it already has 10-15 million users going for it, lets focus on that, rather than even more expensive platforms with a userbase of 0".

Right now a system that's somewhere truly in between a PS3/360 and the Orbis/Durango which are a year away and likely represent a large bump in development costs ... that's the system the Wii U should be. 


this, this is a very good point!



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CCFanboy on 24 November 2012
Kenology said:
I don't think the Wii U will replicate the phenomenon that was the Wii craze and I don't think anyone expects it to. The technophiles all over the net are really down on the Wii U but I think they'll be in for a rude awakening once the real PS4/NextBox specs are revealed.


You have a good point there. Didn't epic and crytek say their new engines were too advanced for the new systems as they saw them?

And I also think people are making a lot of drama out of this power angle. We'll see where the power lovers are when the others release their new systems. Because they certainly weren't there for nintendo when they did it before. I know the media and trolls have found an angle which they are going to beat to death for the next two years but it won't be as simple as they are making out to be. We nintendo fans love our jrpgs so we will still get plenty of love.



One more thing to complete my year = senran kagura localization =D

HoloDust on 24 November 2012
HappySqurriel said:

Certainly, the studio who you outsourced the Mass Effect 3 port wanted a budget large enough to support 2 years of work with 20 developers to ensure that the game looked as good as possible and fully took advantage of the Wii U but they were only given 9 months with 12 developers because EA thought that money would see a better return on a different project.


That's where I see actual problem 3rd parties have - it's not that they can't make it look better, it's that WiiU is not strong enough to just port to it with somewhat higher settings and instanlty have better looking/performing version. If you have to spend some significant amount of extra cash to get the job done cause Ninty went tad cheap on some cruical components, that might avert early on some devs (like Metro devs) from porting at all, unless they see in some future significant user base that is actually buying usual PS30 "hardcore" titles on WiiU.



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DaRev on 24 November 2012
BluGamer23 said:
.. just sit and watch... you see that tablet-thingy-magiggy .. that is the direction gaming on consoles will go..

Spec dont matter at this point for wiiU.. from what Ive seen 'real' peoples reaction to it outside of forums.. and if we are talking about the 90+ million wii crowd.. the majority will be impressed by HD nintendo games.. The graphics on the wiiU is sufficient.. after they see it no one would come in and ask what its got under the hood because it already looks spectacular as it is.. the wii crowd will only mostly compare it to the wii graphics.. and by that it looks amazing.

only a fool would bet against Nintendo.

Excellent point! For if even half the Wii faithful buy a Wii U, the Wii U will be sucessful (as a PS3 )



Nintendo Network ID: DaRevren

I love My Wii U, and the potential it brings to gaming.

HoloDust on 24 November 2012
CCFanboy said:

We'll see where the power lovers are when the others release their new systems.


Hehe, funny thing is that once Microsoft and Sony release their offerings, high end PCs will be already halfway to next-next gen in power.



DaRev on 24 November 2012
Stefan.De.Machtige said:
What developers want, doesn't matter. What the market wants, is all that matters.
I don't see average people screaming around for vastly powerfull/expensive consoles. The console market is getting weaker by the year.
Average people aren't willing to spend too much money on it. Average people are actually moving towards just not caring anymore. They want to be amazed or surprised by something affordable.

IMO Nintendo made a right choice for chosing doing something new and to keep a low price. The extra increase of specs would do little.
Most (if not all) engines will have scalable versions for this generation. So why would you increase the price, for something the average consumer will barely miss or notice.

Totally agree.



Nintendo Network ID: DaRevren

I love My Wii U, and the potential it brings to gaming.

HappySqurriel on 24 November 2012
HoloDust said:
HappySqurriel said:

Certainly, the studio who you outsourced the Mass Effect 3 port wanted a budget large enough to support 2 years of work with 20 developers to ensure that the game looked as good as possible and fully took advantage of the Wii U but they were only given 9 months with 12 developers because EA thought that money would see a better return on a different project.


That's where I see actual problem 3rd parties have - it's not that they can't make it look better, it's that WiiU is not strong enough to just port to it with somewhat higher settings and instanlty have better looking/performing version. If you have to spend some significant amount of extra cash to get the job done cause Ninty went tad cheap on some cruical components, that might avert early on some devs (like Metro devs) from porting at all, unless they see in some future significant user base that is actually buying usual PS30 "hardcore" titles on WiiU.

7+ years of working on the XBox 360 and PS3 has ensured that they already have mature tools that are highly optimized for these platforms, to see a significant visual improvement without putting the time into optimizing the engine for the new platform would require dramatically more processing power. It would be possible to produce this hardware but I'm not convinced Nintendo could have and kept the system's price around $300.

As a rough guestimate, I would say that the typical consumer is willing to spend $25 or $50 more to get double the processing power, and if Nintendo was able to produce a system that was 4 times as powerful as the Wii U for $400 or $450 consumers might accept it; but I think that is highly unlikely and I think that increasing processing power past the current level risks losing more customers due to cost than Nintendo gains from performance.



Kenology on 24 November 2012
CCFanboy said:
Kenology said:
I don't think the Wii U will replicate the phenomenon that was the Wii craze and I don't think anyone expects it to. The technophiles all over the net are really down on the Wii U but I think they'll be in for a rude awakening once the real PS4/NextBox specs are revealed.


You have a good point there. Didn't epic and crytek say their new engines were too advanced for the new systems as they saw them?

And I also think people are making a lot of drama out of this power angle. We'll see where the power lovers are when the others release their new systems. Because they certainly weren't there for nintendo when they did it before. I know the media and trolls have found an angle which they are going to beat to death for the next two years but it won't be as simple as they are making out to be. We nintendo fans love our jrpgs so we will still get plenty of love.

I think folks are expecting PS4/720 to have cutting-edge, high-end PC-esque performance.  But that type of box will cost a ton and I don't know if MS would be willing to take a huge loss on hardware again and we know Sony would be risking the entire company by releasing such a console again.  The only way I can see it working is if they have the same symbiotic relationship they had last gen but losing so much money with the razor and blades model with even higher dev costs it would require makes me really skeptical that it'll actually go down like this.