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Forums - Nintendo - Nintendo Supplementary Device Soon to be Granted?

jason1637 on 18 April 2016
spemanig said:
Soundwave said:
It's a pretty clever way for Nintendo to get potentially several million mini-servers worldwide without paying a dime because consumers will be covering the cost.

If they're smart it could work like this

Regular Console NX = a little better than the PS4

Regular Console NX + SCD Device = on par with PS4K

People who want the highest end graphics can pay a premium for it, that's fair. Nintendo gets free servers. Win win all around.

It's still be paying to run them, but the price is cheaper than if they house everything themselves.

And the ceiling of potential for this is much higher than you're making it out to be. The more these things sell, the more power is available in this cloud network. As far as I am aware, that extra pool of power is indefinite. As long as developers have the time, money, and resources, to  make a game that powerful, with enough SCDs there'd be no other limits.

AKA, imagine a ludicrous future where the NX was attached to an expansion pack with 100 times the power. This patent allows for such a scenario to exist. They'd just need to sell A LOT of SCDs. Obviously this is an exaggeration used to illustrate a point.

Also, people who want the highest end graphics wouldn't have to pay for it at all. That's the point.

It would be pretty crazy if this is the last Nintendo console and every few years a new SCD is released so the platform is in par with the competition. 



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Frogger on 18 April 2016
Soundwave said:
spemanig said:

It's still be paying to run them, but the price is cheaper than if they house everything themselves.

And the ceiling of potential for this is much higher than you're making it out to be. The more these things sell, the more power is available in this cloud network. As far as I am aware, that extra pool of power is indefinite. As long as developers have the time, money, and resources, to  make a game that powerful, with enough SCDs there'd be no other limits.

AKA, imagine a ludicrous future where the NX was attached to an expansion pack with 100 times the power. This patent allows for such a scenario to exist. They'd just need to sell A LOT of SCDs. Obviously this is an exaggeration used to illustrate a point.

Also, people who want the highest end graphics wouldn't have to pay for it at all. That's the point.

It's more about servers. Modern internet connections are too slow right now at least in North America/most of Europe to have some kind of game with 1000000x the power of a console cloud computing being streamed everywhere. 

This is a smart way to get servers out there in the wild ... Microsoft has like a million servers, Sony paid out the wazoo to buy that onLive outfit or whatever. 

Nintendo could get comparable server coverage by passing the cost onto the consumer and then simply giving them digital rewards and the ability to play games in 2K/4K, which really cost the company nothing. 

It's a smart way to basically get a large server infastructure for free essentially. And it keeps the system upgradable and up to date with whatever comes out down the line. 

I wasn't talking about streaming at all. I'm just talking about what is in the patent, which is powering up your game itself by handling tasks externally. The amount of tasks it can compute and the level of tasks is dependent on the latency of the connection to the server itself and the power of the network. The SDC means that the connection is nearly perfect as long as you have a decent connection, and power available is dependent on the size of the network.

Calling it upgradable isn't really correct. It's more that it's organically evolving and growing as more are sold and the network gets bigger.



wombat123 on 18 April 2016
jason1637 said:
spemanig said:

It's still be paying to run them, but the price is cheaper than if they house everything themselves.

And the ceiling of potential for this is much higher than you're making it out to be. The more these things sell, the more power is available in this cloud network. As far as I am aware, that extra pool of power is indefinite. As long as developers have the time, money, and resources, to  make a game that powerful, with enough SCDs there'd be no other limits.

AKA, imagine a ludicrous future where the NX was attached to an expansion pack with 100 times the power. This patent allows for such a scenario to exist. They'd just need to sell A LOT of SCDs. Obviously this is an exaggeration used to illustrate a point.

Also, people who want the highest end graphics wouldn't have to pay for it at all. That's the point.

It would be pretty crazy if this is the last Nintendo console and every few years a new SCD is released so the platform is in par with the competition. 

I could see that working.  And the amount of Nintendo coins (or whatever Nintendo compensates users for letting their SCD be used in the cloud) that could be earned could rise or fall depending on which generation of the SCD you have (as they'd keep on upgrading it over the years to keep up with the competition).  Like if you have a gen3 SCD, you'd get 3 Nintendo coins per hour of use, 2 for a gen2 SCD and 1 for a gen1.  And then as time goes on, older models could be completely phased out and no longer accepted into the Nintendo cloud.  It would essentially keep Nintendo users in the Nintendo ecosystem by not having them continusously have to start their library from scratch each gen and Nintendo would just have to worry about making games.



Soundwave on 18 April 2016
wombat123 said:
jason1637 said:

It would be pretty crazy if this is the last Nintendo console and every few years a new SCD is released so the platform is in par with the competition. 

I could see that working.  And the amount of Nintendo coins (or whatever Nintendo compensates users for letting their SCD be used in the cloud) that could be earned could rise or fall depending on which generation of the SCD you have (as they'd keep on upgrading it over the years to keep up with the competition).  Like if you have a gen3 SCD, you'd get 3 Nintendo coins per hour of use, 2 for a gen2 SCD and 1 for a gen1.  And then as time goes on, older models could be completely phased out and no longer accepted into the Nintendo cloud.  It would essentially keep Nintendo users in the Nintendo ecosystem by not having them continusously have to start their library from scratch each gen and Nintendo would just have to worry about making games.

They might as well embrace something like this. The traditional hardware model doesn't work for Nintendo anymore, really with the exception of a few year fad with motion gaming every one of their consoles has been selling worse for 30 years now. 

They need a way to basically minimize the hardware and make it a non-factor, so that you can get an NX at varying cost/form factors, it upgrades and is open ended as a platform so the Sonys/MS' can't take advantage of it by releaseing newer/better hardware, etc. It should be easy for third parties to program for and unify the Nintendo library. 

If they can do all that with NX they'll basically have addressed their core deficiencies from a hardware POV at least. 



Cobretti2 on 18 April 2016
Volterra_90 said:

I'm not sure if I get what this SCD is. I read some articles but I still have not a single clue about how it works :(. Is it similar to the N64 expansion pack?

nah more like this

http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/alienware-graphics-amplifier?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&sku=452-BBRG

 



 

 

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Frogger on 18 April 2016
jason1637 said:

It would be pretty crazy if this is the last Nintendo console and every few years a new SCD is released so the platform is in par with the competition. 

They wouldn't even need to do that much. The way the patent describes it, it's the network that gives you the power, not just the SCD hardware. If they sell a lot of these things, they wouldn't even need to upgrade the hardware - the network would vastly eclipse any hardware easily.

Like imagine this thing became a massive success and sold like 20m or something. Words cannot describe how powerful of a network that would be.



Cobretti2 on 18 April 2016
spemanig said:
jason1637 said:

It would be pretty crazy if this is the last Nintendo console and every few years a new SCD is released so the platform is in par with the competition. 

They wouldn't even need to do that much. The way the patent describes it, it's the network that gives you the power, not just the SCD hardware. If they sell a lot of these things, they wouldn't even need to upgrade the hardware - the network would vastly eclipse any hardware easily.

Like imagine this thing became a massive success and sold like 20m or something. Words cannot describe how powerful of a network that would be.

They still need to be connected online though and not collecting dust when game droughts are happening. so it is only powerful in theory. 

Yes I'm sure they will offer some Nintendo points rewards scheme to encourage people having it on, but those points better be worth more than the power bill of me keepign it on to be used for cloud grunt work.



 

 

Frogger on 18 April 2016
Cobretti2 said:

They still need to be connected online though and not collecting dust when game droughts are happening. so it is only powerful in theory. 

Yes I'm sure they will offer some Nintendo points rewards scheme to encourage people having it on, but those points better be worth more than the power bill of me keepign it on to be used for cloud grunt work.

That's what the My Nintendo rewards are meant to prevent. You are incentivized to keep it connected at all times.

Nintendo is all about power efficiency, so that definitely won't be even remotely a concern. Plenty of deviced now are on 24/7, most notably routers, which is likely how something like this will be marketed.



Ck1x on 18 April 2016
Soundwave said:
It's a pretty clever way for Nintendo to get potentially several million mini-servers worldwide without paying a dime because consumers will be covering the cost.

If they're smart it could work like this

Regular Console NX = a little better than the PS4

Regular Console NX + SCD Device = on par with PS4K

People who want the highest end graphics can pay a premium for it, that's fair. Nintendo gets free servers. Win win all around.

This exactly! Basically creating and establishing an online community driven by the gamers. This has the potential to substantially change how many people view Nintendo's online infrastructure. Not only that but how cool is it to think that instead of paying for a service like Xbox live or PSN, Nintendo wants to compensate each SCD owner for sharing your processing bandwidth. Since it essentially frees them up from having to establish such large off site servers, If they can effectively showcase how this device could pay for itself. It's going to be a major hit! I think I'm actually more excited about the SCD and how it will all work together than the actual console.



Ck1x on 18 April 2016
Soundwave said:
wombat123 said:

I could see that working.  And the amount of Nintendo coins (or whatever Nintendo compensates users for letting their SCD be used in the cloud) that could be earned could rise or fall depending on which generation of the SCD you have (as they'd keep on upgrading it over the years to keep up with the competition).  Like if you have a gen3 SCD, you'd get 3 Nintendo coins per hour of use, 2 for a gen2 SCD and 1 for a gen1.  And then as time goes on, older models could be completely phased out and no longer accepted into the Nintendo cloud.  It would essentially keep Nintendo users in the Nintendo ecosystem by not having them continusously have to start their library from scratch each gen and Nintendo would just have to worry about making games.

They might as well embrace something like this. The traditional hardware model doesn't work for Nintendo anymore, really with the exception of a few year fad with motion gaming every one of their consoles has been selling worse for 30 years now. 

They need a way to basically minimize the hardware and make it a non-factor, so that you can get an NX at varying cost/form factors, it upgrades and is open ended as a platform so the Sonys/MS' can't take advantage of it by releaseing newer/better hardware, etc. It should be easy for third parties to program for and unify the Nintendo library. 

If they can do all that with NX they'll basically have addressed their core deficiencies from a hardware POV at least. 

I remember when the early NX rumors started to surface there was talk that within Nintendo they felt that this was their most forward thinking system to date. As these patents come to light, I'm starting to believe that they are seriously onto something! Imagine having a couple of these devices and they essentially pay for a major portion of the games you buy simply by allowing them to be used.

I think many on the web are just focused on the base console specs alone, when they should really ask themselves how would an extremely large peer-to-peer networking of these devices across the world change how we view an online service. E3 can't come fast enough!