There is an ongoing discussion on how WiiU will handle PS4 games if PS4 is using 7 gig of RAM and Wii U has 1 available.  The answer really is the 720.  Developers are going to want to make games hit as many consumers as possible.  XBox also has a lot of support from western developers as a primary platform. The amount of RAM used for games on 720 will significantly impact the rest of the industry.

Rumors have circulated that 720 would have 4 gig for OS and 4 gig for games.  If this is the case, the extra 3 gig available for games on PS4 is largely irrelevant for multiplats as developers will want the games to run on 720 as well.

If a game can run on 4, can it run on 1?  Maybe.  PS2 ran the same games as XBox with half the RAM.  25% may be enough with some compromises.

In the end the market will decide what is enough RAM and processing power.  If WiiU sells a lot of units, and 720 is using 4 gig then few developers will design games to push the PS4's 7 gig available.  It's just like Blizzard's strategy with WoW, desigining it to be played on as many systems as possible.  And speaking of PC games, that will also be relevant as most multiplats are PC as well so developers will want the game to be able to hit as many of those systems as they can too.

If 720 surprises and goes with say, 12 gig of RAM with 8 available for games, this will have a negative impact on Wii U support, and Wii U will have to be an extremely viable platform to get continued 3rd party multiplats.

I think the more concrete rumor has been 3GB for the OS. That's been rumored for a long time now.

Great post. I will just say that even if the U had parity, the cube shows that that wouldn't matter, nor cause 3rd party main games (AC, Bioshock, etc.) to make a good sale on the Nintendo platform.

In other words, those 3rd party games don't matter when it comes to Nintendo consoles, so it doesn't matter either way.

The only case we haven't tested so far since the NES/SNES days is if Nintendo had both Wii-like success and parity on one same console. If/when that happened, how would main 3rd party games fare? I would argue/predict just as well as they did on Wii, to be fully honest (e.g. COD on Wii).

Let's say x720 has 4gb for games, I think devs will use PS4 as the primary console and porting games to X720, dumbing them down if needed. Whether or not games comes to Wii U as well is a matter of how big the instal base is and how much it'll cost to dumb down a game sufficiently for it to run on 1GB...

Epic demanded 8 GB of ram from Microsoft and Sony. Theres no way MS is wasting half of that on OS. Its 1GB or less no doubt.

seriously Nintendo should have gone back to cartridges style games with X gb pf ram inside each as required lol.

Then market the console as NO LOAD TIMES. In theory devs should be able to achieve that on flash memory..

thing is, i don't believe it's 4gb, no clue for what the os would need that huge amount. maybe it's 3gb right now or already much less and it was 3gb for an earlier dev kit but that means that only the first games will "only" have 5gb to use. after a year or so it will be already much more with a new version of the os and before that, games won't really use so much since most games will also release for this gen consoles or are also made for ps4 where developers only knew about 4gb until end of february.

During the SNES/NES era, Nintendo had third party dominance. The genesis slowly built marketshare so it was hard for them to get games and so they had to build up first party in nearly all genres to battle with Nintendo.

I'm not sure how useful that is to the post I made. Do you believe that 3rd party main games (Splinter Cell, Tomb Raider) have any importance to Nintendo home console success?

Do you believe that a console with Wii-like success and parity would sell main 3rd party games, or need main 3rd party games? Do you believe that such a console is possible in today's market (e.g. is Wii-like success and parity possible for Nintendo?).

Of course it has relevance to what you're saying and at this point no those games don't really matter on a Nintendo console. Sony put Nintendo in the place that Nintendo put Sega in which is a first party centric console. Nintendo early mid 90s era woud've had great progress with first, second and third party.

Wii-like success is great for first party but a shallow cash grab unless all games were casualized and had Just Dance like sales. Because Nintendo stopped being a gamer console it told the market that only casualized first and third party games and Nintendo core first party could survive because without those gimmicky games it doesnt commit the consumer base to loyalty. They will buy a handful of games and thats it.