Finally, one clarification on the story we did Monday on this subject. For the story, Nintendo had told me that publishers of Wii games need to sell only one million games to turn a profit. The company wrote me to say that it meant that publishers can make a profit selling fewer than one million copies of a particular game. Nintendo declined to be any more specific about a number.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/video-game-makers-seeing-red/?pagemode=print

*cough* I didn't hear the "don't" because I didn't want to *cough*

Vindication.

That did not take as long as I thought it would. Thank you, sir.

^^

Sweet, I'm back in business.

I thought I remember hearing somewhere that the aiming was actually hard to develop for.

I wish they had called it a "retraction" or at least a "correction" instead of a "clarification."

"Let me clarify... I meant the EXACT OPPOSITE of what I said."

Speaking of clarification, WereKitten... What are you trying to say?

I don't know any of the techno-babble, but I know Wii would cost more if it had more expensive components.

Nintendo wanted to break the old model of losing money on console hardware, and dropping price as component prices drop. They thought that consumers placed little or no value in improved graphics anymore, and so instead they focused on the input device. It worked; their sales are really high, and better than the HD systems.

I don't know if third parties entered their thought process at all. They were more thinking about their own games and customers. They aren't going to charge more for the console, and then not take advantage of the added capabilities with their own games. Why would any company raise the price to customers, without increasing the value they are personally offering, just to let third party liscensees pursue a strategy they are opposed to?

Am I missing something here?

Just read the "clarification", lol. ...Anywho to me it was like Nintendo had a crystal ball in knowing that it would be too expensive to go to HD for consoles as fast as their competitors wanted to go.

I do like how most people here are ragging on the NYT journalist without the facts. Everyone is just like "Reggie would never say that, this guy is stupid. I was there and Reggie clearly said 'the wii is amazing and you only have to sell 100 copies to turn a profit.' "

Give the guy a break. He may of misquoted Reggie or he may have had a tape recorder and Reggie may have misspoke. It's not like the guy is an undercover agent out to take down nintendo. Honestly, it effects nothing. It doesn't effect publishers cause they know what they need to sell to turn a profit and it doesn't effect us as consumers.

So deep breaths everyone. It will be ok.

More like 200,000, or close to that.

Actually the higher the resolution the less jagged is the result. You're thinking about upscaling a low resolution image, I'm talking about rendering in HD. It also has the nice sideeffect of providing MSAA for SD, so even at 480p the image would be better.

If the immage is bit-mapped, it depends on the native resolution. If vector-based, yes, it would render at a higher resolution.

As for development costs, I can't see your point. If a developer wants to spend 40M dollars on an HD Wii game and then fails to do profit, that's their bad business choice. Same as if today they spent 40M dollars in developing an incredibly niche RPG on 8 DVDs, and then it sells poorly. How would that influence the developers who decide to keep spending 10M and make money? The Wii proved that it can sell enough of those visually simpler games to its owners.

The only reason to cut HD would be if taking advantage of it necessarily meant higher costs. The emulator rendering disproves that: there would be some free added value for software developers if Nintendo made a different choice.

Let's put it this way: We both accept that it is generally cheaper to develop SD games than HD games (just look at the average development budgets) and, as you are no doubt aware, this is largely because artwork (in some form) is by far the most expensive element of game production. Now, 1) How many games do you think would run in SD if the Wii was a HD console? and 2) Do you honestly believe a great many of those games would not employ more artists and resources to take advantage of the HD functionality?

Really, you're splitting hairs if you argue that Wii games would look better in theory in HD, and you are being unrealistic if you think the average game's budget would not be affected in to attempt to accommodate it to HD resolutions.