Being the first person to encounter a problem is always far harder than being the person who follows them ... Unlike Sony or Microsoft in this generation, there will be a huge knowledge base (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/article_display.php) for Nintendo to learn from the mistakes of HD development and have a much smoother transition.

Nintendo makes games, not consoles. If they think adding RAM will increase the quality of their games and also make profit, they will do it. If not, it won't happen.

What?

Are you sure you know the difference between Nintendo and Sega?

I mean that, when they design hardware, they design it only because they think it will benefit their software business. The hardware serves the software. Sony and MS push hardware even if you don't buy any games (Blu-ray, Live, etc.).

THIS^

Soleron..you make perfect sense..and the OP was wrong..

Nintendo can ALWAYS make good games on their OWN console..and always make the best games for it..

What you said makes absolutely no sense at all.  While Nintendo did listen to the in house software design teams in the past (notably during the N64 design period) to make the hardware cater specifically to the in-house software, during this generation, they held back a Gamecube Zelda game and added motion controls on top and released a tech demo game as a pack in.  There was little content on Wii at first that really used motion controls well, and there is not a whole lot more today.  In fact Nintendo adding Wii Motion Plus so that the developer complaints are addressed is one of the few signs I see, where the hardware is starting to cater to the software.

Design on the XBox360 on the other hand seems to have been very developer centric and allowing the hardware to truly allow the software to be coded in a very efficient manner.  If you think of Blu-Ray movies as software as well, then PS3 was also designed to cater quite a bit more to its software library than the Wii was to its. 

If Nintendo was truly only interested in software business like you say, they would be ones selling the Wii at a loss (at say $99) and then pumping out tons of software at $50 a pop, one big release after another each month.  The reality is the exact opposite of that.

I think Ninty will have an *advantage* - as the "code upgrade" path from Wii to WiiHD is pretty obvious.

What will a PS4 or XBOXNEXT game look like? How hard will it be to make something that looks *significantly* better than a 360/PS3 game? Very, very, VERY hard. They played the "high-res" card this generation.

Ninty gets to play it next generation.

We have all seen GPUs and CPUs for PC evolve quite significantly over the past few years.  PC GPUs and CPUs today are far more advanced than what is in the consoles.  How hard is it to have a system with an eight core processor, a DirectX10 GPU, a few GB of fast RAM, and a big hard drive.  Couple it with a fast Blue Ray Drive and voila, NextBox 720.

I don't think you understand what the difference between a Hardware centric, software centric or service centric approach to development is ... None of the companies follow these approaches in a pure sense, but they all focus on one more than the others.

Sony followed a hardware centric approach with the PS3 because hardware technology was the primary motivating factor in how the hardware was going to be designed. They choose a CPU that had a lot of theoritical processing power, but was not well suited to any existing game engine architecture; and they choose a disc drive which had disc capacity that was far beyond the current requirements of any game. The though process behind the development of the system was "software technology will catch up to the hardware we provide" which is (certainly) not a software centric approach.

Microsoft followed a much more service centric approach with a heavy focus on producing services for developers and consumers. The XBox 360 has attracted a lot of third party developers because the tools to produce XBox 360 games are far superior to anything available for other consoles, it has tons of documentation, and Microsoft has built a lot of great libraries for developers to use. At the same time, it is obvious that the user experience of the XBox 360 was designed around XBox Live.

Its obvious that Nintendo is following a much more software centric approach because they don't waste any money on hardware or services beyond what they require to produce games.

i don't think that will be a big problem for nintendo. honestley the biggest problem I see right now is Nintendo needing to keep their loyal customers and getting more core gamers to buy games for their systems, the Wii specifically. thats the biggest problem for this gen and the next gen.

i think they'll do good developing HD games.