Pushing the Wii's power significantly higher would have resulted in a loss of the Wii's other appealing factors, please keep that in mind. :)

HD would sure destroy the dream of independent and low budget developers making their own game.

HD is already in that little gem. All they need to do is unlock it and pay royalties, the hardware is fully capable of 720p. I personally don't care. The games look good enough for me and this is only the 1st gen wii games. Many of which were actually built on the GC or PS2.

RolStoppable said: vizunary said: I think the Wii too should have HD support. The cost consideration gets less and less by the day, plus a larger install base entering the next generation will help fuel something more ambitious than the Wii(in terms of hardware) with little or no cost increase to the customer. In, what are wii(silly pun, I love those) guessing, 3-5yrs? the HD consideration should be very important. One thing that MANY people fail to realize is that HD market saturation is happening faster than any other market advance, whether it was b&w to color, over-the-air to cable, 8mm film to VHS, VHS to DVD, NONE of these can compare with the percentage of people that are upgrading from SD to HD. What many people fail to realize is that japan has the highest rate of HDTVs in households, yet it is the Wii's strongest market. What makes you think that people that own or purchase HDTVs will only want to buy consoles that support HD?

QFT.

 Japan has much higher HD adoption than both EU and USA and still it is the main consol this gen. The thing is this HD-tv = HD content. Much of the reason why me and my friends buys a HD-tv is that it is flat and big.

Looking how well Wii is selling for the moment I can't understand why it would suddently stop selling because of HD addoption rate increase. I mean look at the advertisment for Wii Sport and ask yourself what they are selling on, is it great graphics or just people having fun?

It has nothing to do with HD penetration, it's just pretty much standard to see a drop in sales after 3 holiday seasons.

johnlucas said: Nintendo doesn't need to change a thing with the Wii. Not a thing. That kind of stuff will actually weaken sales. The only thing Nintendo in the somewhat far future needs to do is add those colors. Boy oh boy when that happens...whoo! Some people are holding out on Wii just because they want a black version. It DID look pretty cool. John Lucas

yep :D i want a black one too.

other than that ;) they just gotta keep making good/fun games.  no need to change what's working brilliantly.

 

Adding HD support--just HD--to a game would add virtually nothing to development costs. In a 3D game, it's a matter of tweaking a couple numbers in the code.

What it would have cost Nintendo to add this ability to the hardware is another question, but I find it hard to believe it could have been much. Shams mentions limitations in the frame buffer and the RAMDAC - is that all that's holding it back? What would an upgrade to those features, plus maybe a little extra memory and such to handle the extra strain, have cost?

Keep in mind that Nintendo is making a $50 profit on each Wii sold. They could have made these upgrades, kept the same price point, and almost certainly have still made a per-unit profit. Instead they neglected to add support for a home theatre centerpiece that will likely be in nearly every Wii owner's home by the end of the system's lifespan--support that would have dramatically improved the visual appeal of their machine. I call that a mistake.

Now, I say that with 20/20 hindsight. I get the feeling that Nintendo wasn't very confident in their machine before launch. They probably wanted to be able to swallow a major failure and still come out on top, and making a tidy profit on each unit is the way to do that. Maybe they expected to cut and run after 2 or 3 years, before HDTV really became the standard. Obviously they couldn't have expected the success they've had. But knowing what we know now, I say that they could have done it, and they should have.

I'm only talking about HD support, but to take that one step further now, can you imagine what the Wii might have been if they'd elected to lose $50 on each unit rather than earn $50? That extra cash could have turned the system into something nearly comparable to an Xbox 360. It couldn't have made the Wii any more successful than it is now, and it would have reduced Nintendo's profits a bit over the next few years, but from the gamer's perspective it would have been a huge boost. And they could have done it without charging us an extra dime for the console.

Borkachev said: Going without HD support was a very wise decision. Nintendo didn't have strong 3rd party support for a whole decade, if Wii games would cost about the same as 360/PS3 games in development, Nintendo would have had next to none 3rd party games at launch and in the following months. Also, the price of the Wii would have been higher and most people would have to pay for a feature they couldn't use. Adding HD support--just HD--to a game would add virtually nothing to development costs. In a 3D game, it's a matter of tweaking a couple numbers in the code. What it would have cost Nintendo to add this ability to the hardware is another question, but I find it hard to believe it could have been much. Shams mentions limitations in the frame buffer and the RAMDAC - is that all that's holding it back? What would an upgrade to those features, plus maybe a little extra memory and such to handle the extra strain, have cost? Keep in mind that Nintendo is making a $50 profit on each Wii sold. They could have made these upgrades, kept the same price point, and almost certainly have still made a per-unit profit. Instead they neglected to add support for a home theatre centerpiece that will likely be in nearly every Wii owner's home by the end of the system's lifespan--support that would have dramatically improved the visual appeal of their machine. I call that a mistake. Now, I say that with 20/20 hindsight. I get the feeling that Nintendo wasn't very confident in their machine before launch. They probably wanted to be able to swallow a major failure and still come out on top, and making a tidy profit on each unit is the way to do that. Maybe they expected to cut and run after 2 or 3 years, before HDTV really became the standard. Obviously they couldn't have expected the success they've had. But knowing what we know now, I say that they could have done it, and they should have. I'm only talking about HD support, but to take that one step further now, can you imagine what the Wii might have been if they'd elected to lose $50 on each unit rather than earn $50? That extra cash could have turned the system into something nearly comparable to an Xbox 360. It couldn't have made the Wii any more successful than it is now, and it would have reduced Nintendo's profits a bit over the next few years, but from the gamer's perspective it would have been a huge boost. And they could have done it without charging us an extra dime for the console.

Now we're getting into specifics that it appears neither of us can answer with much certainty.

My personal estimate is that real HD support for the console would have bumped the price 100 dollars or more, making the price 300-350, not 250. Do you have math to prove otherwise? I'm certainly not suggesting that my knowledge is precise. 

if analysts are that good at predicting, they'd be somewhere in the tropical enjoying their early retirement.

I am looking forward to a black Wii to go with my black DSL :)

You add HD support, you bump up the pixel clock (heat and costs), you increase memory requirements, you increases processor requirements because it has more pixels to deal with or frame rate will sufffer, storage for the larger textures and bitmaps will increase loading time, etc... Basically you bring the price near the Xbox 360... I prefer the lower price. Given Moore's law, In a few years, it will not cost as much more to boost the mhz on all the chips as it would last year.