News Nintendo boss bows out of the console performance war

When did Nintendo ever go head to head on performance. The 90's?

 

The Gamecube was probably the last, it certainly had some of the most gorgeous games of the generation.

 

Skimmed the article, got the gist and made the comment. I regret nothing!

 

Einstein's definition of insanity is so appropriate for Nintendo and their strategy in the console market..

 

If the console's only rumoured (albeit /heavily/) then how come there's launch date for it?

 

Rumoured?...it's been officially confirmed by Nintendo's boss.

 

The NX will have to at least come in close to the effective performance of the 'baseline' PS4/XB1, or cross-platform porting will likely suffer the same hit it with with the Wii.

 

The problem, without enough performance a console doesn't attract 3rd party software and with that sales never take off. The wii succeeded because it was different and appealed to casual gamers of the time, but it's been done and both MS and Sony have there on systems and will also be pushing VR shortly.

 

even if it's a lot cheaper than rival consoles and has some amazing in-house exclusives it's not gonna come close to the big two if 3rd party developers can't easily port games from xb1/ps4/pc. like the wii it'll remain a gimmick - it doesn't need to compete in power terms but they have a perfect opportunity with the two upgraded versions of consoles coming to bring it closer to original xb1/ps4 specs as developers will be making games that can scale down to that level for years to come.

 

Nintendo are setting themselves up for being a niche player. They're focussing more on content than hardware but so far limit their content to their own hardware. Yes, they're putting a toe in the water RE mobile, but when the direction appears to be heavily moving towards realistic 3D environments, VR, Augmented & mixed reality - these need reasonable GPU power to do justice to.

It'll be interesting to see what Nintendo does with NX, as if it's another 'meh' console with an interesting and unique controller I think they'll see it sell in very poor numbers. Unless it's super dirt cheap and aimed at kids.

 

thats been nintys problem since the n64, they pretty much dont want 3rd party multiplatform games.
it wants devs to make games specificaly for its consoles with cough out the cash. they certainly don't want to pay what sony did for MGS3 or microsoft initially did for gears of war. EA/ubisoft/capcom etc out side of japan ninty has to appeal to the growing list on indie devs other wise its gonna be like the wii u all over again.

 

Stay the course Nintendo... we're almost to the cliff... and then, we fly.

 

I can't believe people are still asking Nintendo whether their "next" console will compete for highest performance...

 

Thinking about it, the time when Nintendo launched the Gamecube it still made sense to have a super-powerful console: PCs at the time (early 2000s) weren't powerhouses and graphics cards for PCs were still an expensive rarity, not to mention the chaos surrounding 3D APIs.

Fast-forward over a decade and even the integrated graphics of the friggin' CPU aren't doing a bad job of the average game, to the point where budget graphics cards are unnecessary. This also means that to make a console which is graphically powerful, you need to cram the equivalent of a $1,500+ gaming PC into a box and then sell it for hopefully less than 600 bucks.

Nintendo has correctly seen that this is a losing proposition. Consoles can survive, but they need to find a place in the market where they can be more than just budget gaming PCs.

 

I was paraphrasing from the article...

 

Where Nintendo has an opportunity is if they can make really enjoyable games that run on low spec hardware. That's why the wii was so successful is that despite being short on grunt, lots and lots of people found it fun to play. There will always be more casual gamers than hardcore and if Nintendo can keep coming up with ways to sell them consoles, they can thrive.