Nintendo announce: Nintendo NX

[Entropy]

Nintendo were willing to release the most powerful console they could at a very reasonable price so I wouldnt count Neo Geo which was super powerful but pricier. The SNES was more capable than the Genesis. The same went with the GC. For the price and performance it almost nailed it.

But Nintendo is not in touch with reality. The impression I get from Nintendo is that they are trying to materialize their own vision of a family friendly console, a console that is suitable for kids and grown ups that can play together, something like the equivalent of what board games used to be. The content for that should be neutral and happy. Then they release their product and expect it to attract and shape the market.
They dont check what works in the market currently and release based on that.

I think you are correct in your analysis of Nintendos vision. I think you're wrong in dismissing that this vision can turn into something that has good market penetration. Execution is everything.
The parent part of me is totally on board with Nintendos vision. If they want to reach a mass market, I think this may be the only viable option - find an approach that resonates with families. Mind you, that doesn't say a whole lot about hardware performance, nor, ironically, about what games are available on the platform. It is more about presentation and marketing. If you market with Yoshis' Wooly World, Zelda and Pikmin you make a very different impression than if you do it with God of War, Battlefield and Forza.
Trying to be yet another PS4/XB1 just means too much competition for the same demographic. Nintendo can/should be there, but they need to extend beyond that group. Families is an obvious way to do that. The question is just how to achieve it.
Value, low price, family friendly marketing, width and depth of the games library - all factors that are important and need to be weighed agains each other.

 

[shredenvain]

'Custom' and 'unique' really didn't work very well for PS3. Really.

Today is the age of simplicity for developers. Not the age for custom and uniqueness.

It worked pretty well for the Xbox 360 aside from RROD. My point is that Nintendo will have issues going cheap and competing with or out classing the Ps4 if they use the exact same architecture.

Power VR is pretty well known. They do things differently with their GPUs than Nvidia and AMD. They have even experimented with dedicated Ray tracing hardware. Custom and different doesn't always equal hard to program for.

 

[milk]

I think you are correct in your analysis of Nintendos vision. I think you're wrong in dismissing that this vision can turn into something that has good market penetration. Execution is everything.
The parent part of me is totally on board with Nintendos vision. If they want to reach a mass market, I think this may be the only viable option - find an approach that resonates with families. Mind you, that doesn't say a whole lot about hardware performance, nor, ironically, about what games are available on the platform. It is more about presentation and marketing. If you market with Yoshis' Wooly World, Zelda and Pikmin you make a very different impression than if you do it with God of War, Battlefield and Forza.
Trying to be yet another PS4/XB1 just means too much competition for the same demographic. Nintendo can/should be there, but they need to extend beyond that group. Families is an obvious way to do that. The question is just how to achieve it.
Value, low price, family friendly marketing, width and depth of the games library - all factors that are important and need to be weighed agains each other.

I agree. The wii was smart that it lauched with Wii sports, a generic enough game so that anyone could get behind, but that had enough soul and character for it not to feel comercial and bland. Wii U came with nintendoland, a notalgic masturbation of nintendo's classical characters that neither most parents nor most children really know much about. I still don't understand what they were thinking.

 

[ShyGuy]

I'm sorry, but your lack of logic numbs my mind. Using that same exact thought process would lead to statements like "Kodak will forever be releasing cameras using polaroids."

How is it a lack of logic to say a company will return to making reasonably powerful hardware which was a successful venture for them in the past rather than to try for another lightning in a bottle gimmick which will in most cases fail as badly as WiiU did.

Nintendo do not need to be the market leader to make reasonable profit as they showed in the GameCube / GBA gen.

 

[Nesh]

I think you are correct in your analysis of Nintendos vision. I think you're wrong in dismissing that this vision can turn into something that has good market penetration. Execution is everything.
The parent part of me is totally on board with Nintendos vision. If they want to reach a mass market, I think this may be the only viable option - find an approach that resonates with families. Mind you, that doesn't say a whole lot about hardware performance, nor, ironically, about what games are available on the platform. It is more about presentation and marketing. If you market with Yoshis' Wooly World, Zelda and Pikmin you make a very different impression than if you do it with God of War, Battlefield and Forza.
Trying to be yet another PS4/XB1 just means too much competition for the same demographic. Nintendo can/should be there, but they need to extend beyond that group. Families is an obvious way to do that. The question is just how to achieve it.
Value, low price, family friendly marketing, width and depth of the games library - all factors that are important and need to be weighed agains each other.

It is not wrong that they are trying to resonate with families. The problem is that they ignore the broader spectrum. How about a console that resonates perfectly with families and at the same time does not alienate the rest of gamers and developers?
They cant expect mass appeal by limiting their product offering.
As you can see the franchises that resonate with the family are few and although are successful they are not hardware drivers by big numbers.
No matter how Nintendo sees it, kids still love Playstation and XBOX. They are competing with these guys and they have to understand it. Mario, Yoshi, Pikmin and Zelda were on the GC, N64 and the Wii U. They helped but they didnt help their consoles be on the top. The momentum of Wii died too early. Nintendo cant support a console on their own and with those franchises only.
Their console must be innovative and family friendly but should be a more complete package at the same time. So far they havent being extending beyond that group. They were petting on a group which is smaller and hoped that some invisible group would join

 

[Pixel]

Would Nintendo have to incentivize developers to support an AMD X86 APU with +1.2tflops performance?

Or would developers be willing to gamble development manhours to port their games to NX?

Anyone with incite into this?

 

[BRiT]

All developers and publishers were open to porting their games to the WiiU. Once they saw the rather abysmal purchase rates of their software from the WiiU user base, they abandoned even cheap ports of existing games to that platform. They found out that the current Nintendo user base does not purchase third party titles.

Given that latest round of history and experiences, I do not expect any third party developers or publishers to ever return to the Nintendo console baring some console miracle. For completeness I will include the definition of "console miracle". A Console Miracle being the selling of 80 million Nintendo NX consoles in 3 years and actually having a user base that purchases third party software.

 

[Rodéric]

Bad ports are not a good way to test a new market, and will certainly not improve the opinion consumers have of publishers, confirming that they are uncommited and unreliable.
Seeing how bad most publishers did with titles on the WiiU, I'm not inclined to purchase games from any of them, at least UBISoft tried something and deserve some credit, others just went to the boycott list, for those which weren't already...

 

[Rodéric]

As for NX I'd love to have it use PowerVR Wizard, that'd be a great help for popularising the technology, also a console that I could play both at home on a screen with enhanced graphics and on the go purchasing a game only once would be quite interesting to me. (Especially some kind of enhanced 3DS with 3D 720p screen, and high-end smartphone level technology.)
I could imagine a game like left 4 dead and other games like that being played locally with great fun.

 

[TheLump]

All developers and publishers were open to porting their games to the WiiU. Once they saw the rather abysmal purchase rates of their software from the WiiU user base, they abandoned even cheap ports of existing games to that platform. They found out that the current Nintendo user base does not purchase third party titles.

Given that latest round of history and experiences, I do not expect any third party developers or publishers to ever return to the Nintendo console baring some console miracle. For completeness I will include the definition of "console miracle". A Console Miracle being the selling of 80 million Nintendo NX consoles in 3 years and actually having a user base that purchases third party software.

It is not that black and white. You have to ask why there was not the userbase for those 3rd party games? My bet is because the console was underspecced and marketed abysmally. Not enough people, outside of the hardcore Nintendo crowd, bought the console in the early days because it represented poor value for money and looked tacky. This fed into game sales, which fed into publisher bottom lines, which eventually leads to no support. It's business.

3rd party publishers aren't a sentimental bunch - they will return to whatever console is selling. And to get their console selling Nintendo need to do several things out of the gate: a) Build a box with decent enough hardware that consumers see value, b) Have decent enough marketing that the product seems appealing. Nintendo can easily flounder on either of these two stepping stones, which is why they seem to like going for option c) Try and find an appealing gimmick to create your own niche.

 

[BRiT]

So why dont the hardcore Nintendo fans buy third party titles?

 

[BRiT]

Bad ports are not a good way to test a new market, and will certainly not improve the opinion consumers have of publishers, confirming that they are uncommited and unreliable.
Seeing how bad most publishers did with titles on the WiiU, I'm not inclined to purchase games from any of them, at least UBISoft tried something and deserve some credit, others just went to the boycott list, for those which weren't already...

Those failures fall squarely on Nintendo. Their software development kits and documentation are a total cluster fuck and lead to the "bad ports". Its a major surprise that any third party games were ever released for the WiiU considering how badly Nintendo treated any non Japanese in-house development teams.

It would require yet another console miracle turnaround for Nintendo to have satisfactory development tools for their next console.

 

[Entropy]

It is not wrong that they are trying to resonate with families. The problem is that they ignore the broader spectrum. How about a console that resonates perfectly with families and at the same time does not alienate the rest of gamers and developers?
They cant expect mass appeal by limiting their product offering.
As you can see the franchises that resonate with the family are few and although are successful they are not hardware drivers by big numbers.
No matter how Nintendo sees it, kids still love Playstation and XBOX. They are competing with these guys and they have to understand it. Mario, Yoshi, Pikmin and Zelda were on the GC, N64 and the Wii U. They helped but they didnt help their consoles be on the top. The momentum of Wii died too early. Nintendo cant support a console on their own and with those franchises only.
Their console must be innovative and family friendly but should be a more complete package at the same time. So far they havent being extending beyond that group. They were petting on a group which is smaller and hoped that some invisible group would join

I think we are in complete agreement then - for a wider appeal, they need a games library with width and depth, and without third party developers on board, that is difficult to achieve. And third parties want a solid user base, combined with a low cost of entry, the latter of which is helped by hardware capabilities that are equivalent to the other consoles, or better, and accessible without having to jump through architectural hoops.
Nintendo has demonstrated that they do want a wider library by financing games such as Bayonetta, Xenoblade Chronicles X, Devils Third and that black crow horror thing. And while the sales level of the WiiU has been maintained or perhaps even improved a bit, their efforts just aren't enough to turn the WiiU ship around at this point either.
It will be interesting to see what conclusions they have drawn in terms of hardware. Supposed leaks have been all over the place, and referring both to handheld and stationary devices, meaning that it is impossible to separate speculation from leaks. From an industry observer point of view, the most interesting scenario would be if they introduced a home console that was a notch up in hardware capabilities relative to the PS4/XB1, and see if this indeed had any bearing on third party support or customer demographic. But I'm not sure that is what would be most interesting for either Nintendo or consumers.

 

[TheLump]

So why dont the hardcore Nintendo fans buy third party titles?

I'm sure some do, some don't. It just comes down to volume; The crowd that will blindly buy a Nintendo console are not going to be large enough to support a healthy 3rd party library.

 

[BRiT]

I'm sure some do, some don't. It just comes down to volume; The crowd that will blindly buy a Nintendo console are not going to be large enough to support a healthy 3rd party library.

Initially you have the large boom of enthusiast consumers with a very limited selection of games. That should make it extremely easy to get sales. The fact that it was extremely difficult for any third party to even break 100K unit sales indicate that market wont buy third party games. It should be like shooting fish in a barrel to get game sales with such a captive market.

Hardware in first month was 3 million units.
Software titles available in first month at retail was less than 27.
No individual Third party broke 100K units sold; that's not even 3% of the captive market.

When the third party developers stopped supporting it, there was still less than 60 total games available. By 6 months after the release of WiiU, EA pulled any and all support for the platform. Then 2 months later Bethesda followed suit and pulled their support too.

 

[TheLump]

Initially you have the large boom of enthusiast consumers with a very limited selection of games. That should make it extremely easy to get sales. The fact that it was extremely difficult for any third party to even break 100K unit sales indicate that market wont buy third party games. It should be like shooting fish in a barrel to get game sales with such a captive market.

Hardware in first month was 3 million units.
Software titles available in first month at retail was less than 27.
No individual Third party broke 100K units sold; that's not even 3% of the captive market.

When the third party developers stopped supporting it, there was still less than 60 total games available. By 6 months after the release of WiiU, EA pulled any and all support for the platform. Then 2 months later Bethesda followed suit and pulled their support too.

Yeah that's kinda what I'm saying. The 'Nintendo Enthusiast' userbase alone isn't going to support 3rd party games enough. And to get a userbase other than just the enthusiasts, Nintendo needs to either offer a product which - to start with at least - is appealing to the tech-conscious mass market of today (eg: decent specs, appealing design, good marketing, value) or carve out their own niche again (requires another golden idea a la Wii. Which isn't going to happen imo).

 

[Goodtwin]

Those failures fall squarely on Nintendo. Their software development kits and documentation are a total cluster fuck and lead to the "bad ports". Its a major surprise that any third party games were ever released for the WiiU considering how badly Nintendo treated any non Japanese in-house development teams.

It would require yet another console miracle turnaround for Nintendo to have satisfactory development tools for their next console.

The development tools were pretty bad early on and that explains early performance issues with some launch titles. Not all of them were all that bad though, Mass Effect 3 was pretty much on par with the 360 build, and didn't suffer from screen tearing. Black Ops 2 was another example of a game that played nearly identical to the other builds online according to Digital Foundry, just had less people playing. Need For Speed MW was the best console build. So while there were plenty of poor port examples, there were also quite a few solid efforts. It was really the following year after launch where it became obvious the developers made little to no effort. Sales for their biggest games the year prior on Wii U limited the incentive to devote resources to a build that will likely sell the least. So that was a snowball effect. Sales were low, so the effort was low, and then the product was subpar quality and sales fell even further despite a larger install base. Games like Assassins Creed 4, Call of Duty Ghost, and Batman Origins should have faired better thanks to improved development documentation and tools, but they actually performed worse than their launch titles the year prior. To be fair, developers had years to optimize their game engines for the 360 and PS3, there was no way they were going to poor in the resources to do the same for Wii U with PS4 and X1 just around the corner.

For me it is surprising how terrible the attach rate of third party software is for Wii U. I personally have COD Black Ops 2, COD Ghost, Mass Effect 3, Zombi U, Batman AC, Batman Origins, Need For Speed MW, Legend of Kay, and Rayman Legends. Not to mention exclusives like Bayonetta 2 and Lego City Undercover (exclusive third party games seem to do better). Many of my buddies over at TNE have many of these titles as well, so it always astonished me that games as popular as COD couldn't even sell well on Wii U. Apparently we are a niche group of Nintendo fans, because it seems most Wii U owners really don't buy anything other than Nintendo made games on the platform.

This is why its important for Nintendo to drive a large install base. It takes a much larger install base in the Nintendo community to make up for the lesser attach rate. If Nintendo wants third party ports, then the hardware had better make it pretty much cut and paste, because third parties wont jump on board if its not easy for them.

 

[Pixel]

This is why despite all the fan boys in

This is why its important for Nintendo to drive a large install base. It takes a much larger install base in the Nintendo community to make up for the lesser attach rate. If Nintendo wants third party ports, then the hardware had better make it pretty much cut and paste, because third parties wont jump on board if its not easy for them.

Starting late in the console cycle and with less assurance of equivalent 3rd party to Sony/MS, and with inferior online infrastructure, if Nintendo aims for the same price bracket with roughly equivalent specced system as Xbox One, I don't see why that larger audience outside of Nintendo software loyalists would buy the NX.
I really want Nintendo to thrive but they seem between a rock and a hard place.

 

[Megadrive1988]

If Nintendo can get a variety of hardware options out there on both the console side and handheld/portable side with a mix of great 3rd party and 1st party titles along with a simple but reliable online service, they might be able to pull in enough users from all segments, mainstream, hardcore and casual, in turn pulling in more 3rd party support. The idea of being able to write a game or port a game once to the NX architecture and letting people buy a title for which ever form of the hardware they have sounds really nice. IF that is what NX is all about and if that's how Nintendo's NX ecosystem works.

Make no mistake, Nintendo is in a really tough place right now as we start the new year. It'll be interesting to see if Nintendo shows signs of doing things the way the rest of the industry does, or if they'll stick to the tradictional hardline Nintendo way of doing things.

 

[Esrever]

Nintendo needs to have a good online infrastructure and it would need to be free. They also need to get the new games to be made for NX. All the third party games for the Wii U were a bunch of ports of games that have been out for a year. People who at first to buy a new console probably owned last gen consoles and played a decent number of those games already on their old console or were simply not interested. Finally they need to undercut the other consoles in price for hardware that is at least comparable. If they can do all this, they might have a gamecube level of success. Otherwise, they will fail as hard or even harder than the Wii U.