Nintendo's next gen strategy for home & mobile

[liolio]

Hi Four Storm,
I do agree with you wrt to timeline, the sooner the better.
I do agree on a cheap system too. IF DDR4 on 256 bit bus is a better/cheaper option than GDDR5 on a 128 bit one, they should it, especially as Nintendo never really bothers with shrinks.
Now matching the ps4 is not a good idea, they need lot of bandwidth and Ram which costs money. There is no magic if they more less match the ps 4 the system prive is going to be in line with the ps4's one.
They need to be cheaper than that. Imo for the ease of porting they need an UMA memory system. It will helps them more than extra performances.

For the mobile games they need to havr a lot of them, though I never say that they should pass on higher profile games.
Wrt your tiers pricing strategy it easier said than done, attracting mobile games ain't easy even if successful the.system user will be a fraction of mobile and flash/ html5 enabled browsers. May Nintendo could use a customized.browser but imo it has to feel consoly and integrated.

For online I think they will never get there, actually it is true on many accounts, even with redtructuring, R&D, etc one can't turn Nintendo into Sony or MSFT, different beasts, of different size.
They need to do arbitrations. For networking (party system and chat) as well as socual aspect they should go with existing products and integrate them into their products.
Good enough hadware should be easy.
Though they need a light OS and an API to provide BC and forward compatibility.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

There's a full background ad on Eurogamer for Nintendo. "Something new every Thursday on eShop" it says, and then advertises Super Mario Bros 2, for £3.49.

A game from 1988 is considered new and reason to get a Wii U??

 

[Grall]

And paying three and a half quid for a quarter-century old game which fit in 64kb of mask roms is rather more like a spit in the face than a great deal, if you ask me.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

And paying three and a half quid for a quarter-century old game which fit in 64kb of mask roms is rather more like a spit in the face than a great deal, if you ask me.

You must think of it as a donation to Nintendo

 

[Fourth Storm]

^Well said.

Hi Four Storm,
I do agree with you wrt to timeline, the sooner the better.
I do agree on a cheap system too. IF DDR4 on 256 bit bus is a better/cheaper option than GDDR5 on a 128 bit one, they should it, especially as Nintendo never really bothers with shrinks.
Now matching the ps4 is not a good idea, they need lot of bandwidth and Ram which costs money. There is no magic if they more less match the ps 4 the system prive is going to be in line with the ps4's one.
They need to be cheaper than that. Imo for the ease of porting they need an UMA memory system. It will helps them more than extra performances.

For the mobile games they need to havr a lot of them, though I never say that they should pass on higher profile games.
Wrt your tiers pricing strategy it easier said than done, attracting mobile games ain't easy even if successful the.system user will be a fraction of mobile and flash/ html5 enabled browsers. May Nintendo could use a customized.browser but imo it has to feel consoly and integrated.

For online I think they will never get there, actually it is true on many accounts, even with redtructuring, R&D, etc one can't turn Nintendo into Sony or MSFT, different beasts, of different size.
They need to do arbitrations. For networking (party system and chat) as well as socual aspect they should go with existing products and integrate them into their products.
Good enough hadware should be easy.
Though they need a light OS and an API to provide BC and forward compatibility.

Thanks for reading that megalith of a forum post. I don't know what came over me.

hi liolio, I enjoy your criticism of Nintendo's hardware. I agree that matching PS4 should not be a priority. The more I think about it, somewhere between Xbox One and PS4 would be a nice place for Nintendo to sit.

Memory wise, unified is nice but expensive with more bandwidth. We have not heard any dev complaints about Wii U's setup in that regard. If the eDRAM is only ~32 GB/s, it may be possible to carry over in some capacity, even on a daughter die. But yeah, in the end this starts getting expensive and not worth it, especially at the expense of decent bandwidth to "external" RAM.

On Networking, you may be right and it is a lost cause. I do not know why they failed to offer more with Wii U - I believe they have already collaborated with outside companies for this. We got Miiverse out of it, and a friends list that takes you out of the game to even scroll through. Awful implementation of decent (if unappealing to many, in Miis) ideas. Is stuff like voice/party chat a matter of dedicated servers? They have the video chat on Wii U, but I've never tested it and you can't do it while a game is loaded. Their own netcode for Wii games was hit or miss in my experience, and so far nonexistent on Wii U, so who knows what state they're at.

To attract more mobile games, Nintendo need to get their storefront together. Revamp the eShop and allow users to browse and purchase games for all Nintendo systems whether using a home console, portable, pc, smartphone, etc. I think they are already making good strides to make porting easy with Unity and Web Framework. Yeah they will never have as many mobile devs as, well, mobile, they just need a platform which is viable to make money on and easy to develop for and they'll get enough support to make an impact. For now, they are best focusing on individual partnerships and getting them in early on their next gen platforms.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

I still think they should abandon the console hardware market.

 

[liolio]

I still think they should abandon the console hardware market.

Definitely I don't see how they could go wrong with software only, now I don't see them doing it now, their treasury allows them another try at the home and handheld console market.
But indeed if you look at the relatively secured iOS market and the home console market... Even successful consoles are to lose them money vs turning into a publisher.

 

[Pressure]

And paying three and a half quid for a quarter-century old game which fit in 64kb of mask roms is rather more like a spit in the face than a great deal, if you ask me.

Weirdly enough that 64kb still has more repalyability than what most games can muster today.

 

[swaaye]

WiiU never generated any buzz. It's not a graphics powerhouse so doesn't attract that demographic. The curious, but prolific, casual Wii people seem burned out and WiiU has nothing they're interested in. I really don't know what WiiU needed to work out. A lot of the console world is fixated on Sony and Microsoft now since Nintendo hasn't dominated since SNES. Their success with portables doesn't seem to translate.

Weirdly enough that 64kb still has more repalyability than what most games can muster today.

Subjective.

 

[itsmydamnation]

Subjective.

funny i was just playing super mario all-stars via zsnes on my xtz using a wii-mote .

I reckon niniy should be bold, dont follow MS and Sony in terms of hardware mix. In other words go for a lot more CPU performance with somewhere in the middle of X1 PS4 GPU. In 2015 that could very well be a almost straight excavator APU, quad channel DDR4. Use that CPU grunt to create first party games that differentiate from the other consoles based on interactivity/physics etc and keep nintendo clean/neat style of graphics.

 

[Grall]

Why do we need another console that only runs nintendo games? That's obviously not what people want. To attract mass-market appeal you need third-party support (and incidentally, the other way around), and to do that you need hardware parity at minimum with the other consoles. Launching a new console that may not be equal to PS4 in friggin 2016 (I'd like to remind people that PS4 is nothing spectacular as of today) is going to be half-assed beyond belief and won't be taken seriously by anyone in the industry.

A scant few years after '16 the next round of Sony and MS consoles with far greater capabilities will appear (no, all-streaming internet-only gaming won't be ready in just a few years' time), and any third-party support this theoretical nintendo system has will be dropped like it was a piece of dogshit in preparation for that. Nintendo's console will be super dead, and they will lose a monkeyload of money on it.

Nintendo claimed porting software to the wuu would be effortless, or at least implied it would be nearly so, and they obviously lied through their teeth. Third-parties are obviously punishing nintendo for that, and also the non-spectacular sales. What are you going to expect though when you deliberately stay so far behind the technology curve? It's like the PR material for nintendo's new car model proudly proclaims, "now with twin-port carburettor!", with the company hinting that fuel injection might be offered for the next generation.

What a laugh.

And for those who claim that the general public don't care about tech specs, yeah, they don't, but they are also driven towards things that are NEW, and a roughly PS360 console launching six/seven years after PS360, which does not run PS360 games is not NEW. Not in 2012, not in 2013 and definitely not now in 2014 when people are getting used to real, actual HD consoles. So they can't create yet another me-too-also-ran system that arrives way, way late. They've done that, and it doesn't work. They don't have the influence and mindshare anymore that they used to. They can't drive people to their system (nor make devs make games for it) just by being there, by putting it out for sale. They lost that when friggin PSX launched almost 20 years ago now, and nintendo still hasn't realized it.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Another point that just ocurred to me was that Wii's success was in some ways based on a false offering. People played waggle until they realised that the tech wasn't at all accurate and they could hit the tennis ball back with any old wrist flick. That possibly accounts for why a lot of Wii's sit unused - the tech didn't really work as promised. So even Nintendo's big success wasn't really a big success as it introduced waggle in a way that may well have killed off a lot of interest in it, and it'll be VR that brings it back no doubt. Nintendo sold millions of Wii's not because it offered a fabulous gaming experience, but because it had a compelling novelty for party play.

 

[wco81]

Another point that just ocurred to me was that Wii's success was in some ways based on a false offering. People played waggle until they realised that the tech wasn't at all accurate and they could hit the tennis ball back with any old wrist flick. That possibly accounts for why a lot of Wii's sit unused - the tech didn't really work as promised. So even Nintendo's big success wasn't really a big success as it introduced waggle in a way that may well have killed off a lot of interest in it, and it'll be VR that brings it back no doubt. Nintendo sold millions of Wii's not because it offered a fabulous gaming experience, but because it had a compelling novelty for party play.

That was obvious from the beginning with Wii Sports.

Then games like Tiger Woods promised 1:1 tracking. Then Nintendo offered an upgraded controller which would be more accurate.

But the gimmick sold a lot of peripherals, spread by word of mount among people who really didn't play console games before.

And you know what, Kinect is a gimmick too. It can't fully replace a controller for most games. There's no evidence that it helps sell the console in any better numbers.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

And you know what, Kinect is a gimmick too. It can't fully replace a controller for most games. There's no evidence that it helps sell the console in any better numbers.

That's debatable, but I think it safe to say that, generally, new tech is introduced before it's really ready, and suffers in the long term as a result. eg. Tablets were around a long time before Apple turned into the phenomena they now are, and now everyone's doing them. If Wii had launched as Move, and Kinect had launched as K2 without the breakdancing avatars with impossible poses, maybe the sequels and hardwares would be approached with more maturity and confidence than the usual 'target for cheap minigames'?

I suppose that theory would lead me to be apprehensive of a new hardware feature for a new Nintendo console that wasn't already proven (eg. VR has enough history to not be new now. Direct brain control or eye tracking would have me thinking it'll be ineffective in real terms).

 

[wco81]

I'm also skeptical that VR and Occulus Rift will be big.

Well, let me put it a little differently. They may ship in the millions. But they will remain a fraction of the installed base. Would be surprised if it hit 1/3 or even 1/4 of the installed base of consoles.

Anyways, on motion, we're still waiting for the "revolutionary" game play mechanic. They're struggling as it is to replicate the precision and accuracy (both positional and timing) of controllers.

 

[liolio]

Why do we need another console that only runs nintendo games? That's obviously not what people want. To attract mass-market appeal you need third-party support (and incidentally, the other way around), and to do that you need hardware parity at minimum with the other consoles. Launching a new console that may not be equal to PS4 in friggin 2016 (I'd like to remind people that PS4 is nothing spectacular as of today) is going to be half-assed beyond belief and won't be taken seriously by anyone in the industry.

We don't need it
Though you don't have to match the PS4, the value proposal as to be good which is different.
Get ports is not so hard, most next gen are running on a lot of different PC conf for example. Nintendo is indeed pushing shitty systems as you say below.

A scant few years after '16 the next round of Sony and MS consoles with far greater capabilities will appear (no, all-streaming internet-only gaming won't be ready in just a few years' time), and any third-party support this theoretical nintendo system has will be dropped like it was a piece of dogshit in preparation for that. Nintendo's console will be super dead, and they will lose a monkeyload of money on it.

I'm still not convinced that Sony and MSFT are safe either but that another topic.

Nintendo claimed porting software to the wuu would be effortless, or at least implied it would be nearly so, and they obviously lied through their teeth. Third-parties are obviously punishing nintendo for that, and also the non-spectacular sales. What are you going to expect though when you deliberately stay so far behind the technology curve? It's like the PR material for nintendo's new car model proudly proclaims, "now with twin-port carburettor!", with the company hinting that fuel injection might be offered for the next generation.

What a laugh.

Indeed that was quite a bad joke

And for those who claim that the general public don't care about tech specs, yeah, they don't, but they are also driven towards things that are NEW, and a roughly PS360 console launching six/seven years after PS360, which does not run PS360 games is not NEW. Not in 2012, not in 2013 and definitely not now in 2014 when people are getting used to real, actual HD consoles. So they can't create yet another me-too-also-ran system that arrives way, way late. They've done that, and it doesn't work. They don't have the influence and mindshare anymore that they used to. They can't drive people to their system (nor make devs make games for it) just by being there, by putting it out for sale. They lost that when friggin PSX launched almost 20 years ago now, and nintendo still hasn't realized it.

Yop they need to change but they can only change that much. Imo software only would make them a lot of money (though I wonder if actually theirs IPs could erode fast under this scenario) but they have a clear shot at low end. Hardware needs to be good relatively to the launch time frame, WiiU did not even come close.

As I don't see them quiting hardware, low end is their best bet, imo they don't need crazy online.
Imo local mp is still important in the console realm. For the same reason it is risky to go digital only, lots of people don't have the bandwidth, but they also have suboptimal ping, etc.

I completely agree we are in 2014, don't know when their next systems are to launch but the experience has to be good, well rounded.
They can only do so much in a couple of year, that is why I wonder about making it simple, a system that plays games with limited functionality (compares to the ps4 or the Xbone) but that do what it does (outside of gaming) well.

The big deal is where is Nintendo in term of competences in many fields, from graphics, to OS, API, internet side of things, etc. I've this gross feeling that actually they can't even make something relatively simple (by nowaday) right.
I heard that they are increasing R&D but iirc the basis looked really really low when you think about what a modern console, even a simpler one than say the Xbone, is.

I feel like they should use something that already exists, OS and API and slap an UI on top of it.
Imo their efforts on that front looks dreadful. I'm sure Valve will do a massively better job at tweaking Linux than what Nintendo can even dream of doing.

To make it short, discussing business plan is interesting but at the core the real question seems to be how low Nintendo let its overall technical competences sink?
Matching question is can they admit it and out source lot (if not all) of the work?

The fact that they increase in house R&D is a bad omen, in a couple of year it won't grant any significant results.

If I had to bet I would say that their next system will fail badly /the whole project could go out of hand with delays and possibly not ship at all. The ycould not do it right in 2012, it seems they won't launch something new before 2016, by this time low end will imo be under pressure of a lot of potent smart TV, Apple/Google/"insert brand" set-top-boxes, etc.
I believe it could put such pressure on their project (be it handheld or ome) that they may aim for something they won't be able to deliver / project failure. Think of the fate of the virtualizer on a greater scale, hardware could fail and so could software (OS and service side, the were close at the WiiU launch).

 

[Deleted member 13524]

As I don't see them quiting hardware, low end is their best bet, imo they don't need crazy online.

Low-end with poor online is the Wii U, which by now has proven not to be a good bet.

That much seems obvious to me.

 

[liolio]

Are you putting the WIIU failure on onlibe infrastructure only? There are a lot more issues that set the fate of the system.
The target was never hardcore, Nintendo failed to reach casuals, casual cores etc. I would.think that online take.the back seat to a lot of other considerations.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Are you putting the WIIU failure on onlibe infrastructure only? There are a lot more issues that set the fate of the system.

No, I'm saying the Wii U is exactly what you were suggesting for a future console: weak hardware for its release date with low investment in the online features.

 

[Grall]

Nintendo's big focus is on kids (although the parents of said kids may not be as devoted towards nintendo in return anymore), and they're paranoid their kiddy console is going to become associated with grooming pedos, hence the poor online feature set (that, and the fact they're friggin incompetents over there in kyoto and lack the knowledge and experience to design a comprehensive online experience - just look at the janky "friends code" system they've been using for years and years as an example of that.)