Nintendo announce: Nintendo NX

[fehu]

If you are not sony, being not first in hardware is great problem, so a not sony company must spend on hardware to compensate the not sony sindrome, or not having any hope to be first (or even second) go just for the biggest profit realistically possible, even being it selling just hardware and first parties.
And the wii?
Fuck, I always forget about it

 

[Deleted member 13524]

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

Isn't the answer inside that question?

What popular third party titles would the hardcore fans of New Super Mario Bros, Mario Galaxy and Mario Kart be interested in?
Little Big Planet could be something that interests to Mario sidescroller fans, but it's from a Sony first-party. Mario Kart fans could be interested in e.g. Sonic Racing Transformed from Sega, but that's not a high-profile title anyways.

Thing is, Nintendo carved its niche really well. They're the best at making fun fantasy karting, 2d side-scrollers and 3d-platformers. And that's for better and for worse.
The good part is that hardcore fans will buy their hardware just for those games. The bad part is that 3rd parties will now avoid those genres like the plague, in fear of comparisons during reviews.

Just look at how much trouble Square-Enix got into, just by rebooting Tomb Raider during the age of Uncharted.

As for NX I'd love to have it use PowerVR Wizard, that'd be a great help for popularising the technology,

When was Nintendo ever able to popularize anything in a console, other than user input some 10 years ago?
And from there you want them to popularize something as hard/expensive as real-time raytracing?

 

[Rikimaru]

Mario Kart fans could be interested in e.g. Sonic Racing Transformed from Sega, but that's not a high-profile title anyways.

How do you measure this? It's on par with MK8. Sonic Racing Transformed has much more content and it's good. MK8 has better mechanics and tracks though.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

How do you measure this? It's on par with MK8. Sonic Racing Transformed has much more content and it's good. MK8 has better mechanics and tracks though.

In my perception, Mario Kart's production values are a lot higher, seeing how the tracks have so much more detail. Sonic Racing Transformed seems like a much simpler game in comparison.

 

[Rikimaru]

In my perception, Mario Kart's production values are a lot higher, seeing how the tracks have so much more detail. Sonic Racing Transformed seems like a much simpler game in comparison.

Production values are higher (more polished) but SRT has much more details on track and outside of it. It also has much wider tracks.

 

[Goodtwin]

Mario Karts 8 runs at twice the framerate as SRT, and SRT also rendered below 720p native, so its reasonable for it to have a superior level of detail. With that said, Mario Kart 8 looks clean as hell. A simpler design can be much cleaner, and inherently more visually pleasing for the player. MK8 is very clean, and in my opinion, looks nicer than SRT. Not that SRT looks bad, its looks great, but is muddier and less fluid than MK8.

As for NX and third parties, its really a muddy situation. Even if Nintendo tries to create a console that is third party oriented, this may not be very successful. Why would third parties suddenly flock to the system. I think they will still have a wait and see attitude. I believe some of this stems from the fact that third parties already have two consoles where they offer the premier software. With a Nintendo console, they are in direct competition with everything Nintendo releases. Third party games have notoriously played second fiddle to Nintendo's first party titles dating back to the N64 generation. So is it really in Ubisofts, EA, and Activision best interest for Nintendo to own a large chunk of market share. I cant see a situation where your current COD and Madden gamers jump to a Nintendo consoles simply because those games are now offered there. Perhaps they could have some success with that approach assuming they can severely undercut those consoles in price, but who's to say Sony and Microsoft wont just drop the price even if it results in some losses to keep Nintendo from taking market share. So I am pretty much convinced that they need a concept that can appeal to a very broad audience. Leading the way with a bunch of launch window Nintendo games is the best way to jump out of the gate. Perhaps secure some exclusives with some third party developers who perhaps haven't had the success they were looking for on the Xbox and Playstation platforms. Im talking about developers like Platinum Studios, Tecmo Koei and the plethora of 3DS third party developers. Nintendo has said before that if Gamecube like hardware sales were to be the goad, they would rather exit the hardware market. I think Nintendo is prepared to shoot for a surprise success like the 3DS and Wii, instead of conforming to simply being a me too console and sell sub 30 million units.

 

[McHuj]

It would be really nice if NX was based on AMD Polaris architecture. I guess Nintendo could be in the ballpark of X1 performance wise, but with a substantially lower power consumption.

 

[TheLump]

It would be really nice if NX was based on AMD Polaris architecture. I guess Nintendo could be in the ballpark of X1 performance wise, but with a substantially lower power consumption.

Not impossible given Polaris is out this summer, but it seems too 'new' for Nintendo imo. Same with the Zen speculation; bit too hot off the press (judging by Nintendo's recent track record of hardware choices at least)


...Unless of course NX is not coming this year, in which case yeah it would seem more likely.

 

[London Geezer]

Yeah Nintendo has never been at the forefront of new technology, as has been mentioned many times before here.

 

[MrFox]

There is some hope I think. The new CEO (Kimishima) was against the WiiU and said it would fail, I like him already. It's Miyamoto who was in charge of the WiiU and he's not making the NX. So hopefully with new people at the top, and in hardware design, this is won't be like the old Nintendo.

 

[Goodtwin]

I think Nintendo is basically jumping on board with AMD's Zen processors. Instead of funding R&D for a custom chip, doesn't it make sense to make a deal for a semi custom chip of AMD's future processors lineup? Im sure AMD loves it, because it gives them extra funds for a processor they were developing anyway. I do expect Nintendo's power efficient and small to be intact, because I believe both console and portable will use the same chipset. The portable will probably have less GPU grunt, but the screen resolution wont be any higher than 720p, so it should work.

 

[tunafish]

The problem with Zen for NX is that the very first Zen chips are expected out at the very end of this year. In the past, Nintendo has always targeted their consoles at the xmas market. If they want to go for Zen, they either have to not do that and release mid-winter when no-one is spending money, or they have to target 2017.

While Zen would be cool, given what the competitors are using I honestly think that a 14nm shrink of Jaguar would be the more sensible choice. Slightly faster but with a year of extra sales is better than a lot faster but too late, IMHO.

And that is assuming that Nintendo even wants to go faster. If Nintendo is feeling atypically adventurous, they can go for 14nm and new GCN, which provides two interesting opportunities: Either faster at the same price, or much cheaper at the same speed. I think the second might well make more sense.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Why would Nintendo use Jaguar if Puma (now Puma+ in Carrizo-L) has been around for almost 2 years?

. The new CEO (Kimishima) was against the WiiU and said it would fail, I like him already.

IIRC, Kimishima was against the Wii U's marketing strategy. Which just shows that he has half a drop of common sense.

 

[Rikimaru]

The problem with Zen for NX is that the very first Zen chips are expected out at the very end of this year. In the past, Nintendo has always targeted their consoles at the xmas market. If they want to go for Zen, they either have to not do that and release mid-winter when no-one is spending money, or they have to target 2017.

New portable this year. Console next year.
They can not launch 2 same year. Nobody will buy 2. They can not make enough software.

I doubt they'll use Zen even for 2017 launch though.

 

[AlNom]

Why would Nintendo use Jaguar if Puma (now Puma+ in Carrizo-L) has been around for almost 2 years?

I take it to mean he meant Jaguar family. The Puma iteration is mostly power consumption tweaks, which would probably just be a freebie for any new product. I mean I wonder how far off the current gen consoles are from it really.

e.g.

• Support for ARM TrustZone via integrated Cortex-A5 processor
  
• Support for DDR3L-1866 memory

The selective boosting is probably not something they'd take advantage of for a console target anyway.

 

[milk]

IIRC, Kimishima was against the Wii U's marketing strategy. Which just shows that he has half a drop of common sense.

So WiiU actually had one? Beside a stealth lauch and praying to god someone bought it?

 

[Deleted member 13524]

So WiiU actually had one? Beside a stealth lauch and praying to god someone bought it?

Yes, the plan was to shove the tablet controller in front of everyone's eyes while hoping no one would notice the crappy hardware of the new console.
The end result was that people thought the tablet controller was just a peripheral for the old Wii.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

New portable this year. Console next year.
They can not launch 2 same year. Nobody will buy 2. They can not make enough software.

The idea behind being the same architecture is that they run the same software.

 

[ShyGuy]

New portable this year. Console next year.
They can not launch 2 same year. Nobody will buy 2. They can not make enough software.

I doubt they'll use Zen even for 2017 launch though.

Well the popular thinking based on quite a few Iwata comments is that NX is a single architecture with multiple form factors which play the same games. People who currently like 3DS would buy the portable, people who want the big screen HD experience would buy the home version and the hardcore Nintendo fans would at some stage buy both.

 

[function]

Universal apps - buy more hardware if you want to play the game in more places.

Would be interesting to see Nintendo offer the first '4K' games console (albeit uprezzed and upAAed hand held games). That could be an interesting attention grabber for the general gamer.