Fact: Nintendo to release HD console + controllers with built-in screen late 2012

[BRiT]

$120K?! How come you assume that 60K of disposable salary means an income of >2*$60K??

Because people refer to disposable income when they're really talking about discretionary income, the income left after paying taxes and all bills for necessities.

From some quick back of the envelope calculations for an Individual living in Parma, Ohio making $120K a year

$120000 --- US Salary
$33600 --- Federal Tax Bracket 28% [range of $83K - $171K]
$4691 --- Ohio State Taxes [$3,715.30 + 5.451% of excess over $102,100]
$3000 --- Local Taxes [ Parma has a 2.5% tax rate ]

After state and federal take their cut, that's $78709 left to pay off all the rest of your bills.

Is it so hard to imagine having over $18K a year for bills for a single individual?

 

[patsu]

I think we can assume what Reggie meant when he talked about the Wii user base. The Wii numbers speak for themselves.

Looks like WiiU is meant for someone like me. Looking forward to see what Nintendo will bring to the party.

As for his comments on social apps and monetization, it's true that many/most community sites and services don't make (much) money if at all. But their marketing effects cannot be ignored. Plus the user base help scale the effect exponentially at shared cost or even revenue. And the company can layer something else on top to explore other models. It's an open question like regular businesses.

EDIT:
I noticed that many companies don't know how to build an effective community site or social app though. They copied the "on-the-surface" community features without thinking through the dynamics.

 

[wco81]

Hmm, Wii U won't be for kids but grown ups with higher than median paying jobs?

 

[patsu]

Kids tag along with their parents. ^_^

And some daddies are like kids, if you believe moms.

 

[wco81]

I think the PS3/360 demographic skewed higher than previous generations, especially the first couple of years.

Not sure it's a good idea for Nintendo to focus on the people who buy the latest smart phones, tablets and other gadgets.

 

[RudeCurve]

Haha are they trying to move away from the kiddy image again?

 

[Sonic]

Blah. Nintendo is too conservative of a company for me to like, and their "innovations" are gimmicks. I really hope this guy isn't serious when he says it is for the market to decide, and showing so much arrogance. Nintendo is in a very tricky place right now, what with stale hardware that has lost its steam and could end up #2 in sales this gen. We have whispers from devs that say the WiiU is more powerful than PS360 but not by a lot. I really hope that not to be the case and that Nintendo is smart enough to put at least a beefy GPU in the system and it not be crippled. They really need to let the Wii fade into oblivion when the Wii U comes out and focus on that, especially since the other guys will be releasing their much more powerful systems not too long after WiiU drops. They are so tight lipped about their hardware that it's nigh on impossible to get details on it. You'd think more would have leaked by now, so my hope is that they are still improving on the machine. Has there been any news when WiiU will go into production?

Then again, this could be their Dreamcast.......and if that's the case I hope their transition to software only is more graceful than my beloved former employer.

 

[Kaotik]

You could just aswell call improved graphics as "gimmicks", the fact is that Nintendo is the only console company that has done any real innovations lately, both with their handhelds and with Wii.
Sony and Microsoft have only done more of the same old, and then later copied Nintendos ideas (Sony more directly, Microsoft less so)

 

[Sonic]

You could just aswell call improved graphics as "gimmicks", the fact is that Nintendo is the only console company that has done any real innovations lately, both with their handhelds and with Wii.
Sony and Microsoft have only done more of the same old, and then later copied Nintendos ideas (Sony more directly, Microsoft less so)

I do not agree. I'll even go on to say that Live, while being started on the original Xbox, is more of an innovation than the Wii controller. And then there's Kinect, which is somewhat of a rip off of the Wii controller, but IMO far better implemented and more pleasing to use.

 

[Kaotik]

I do not agree. I'll even go on to say that Live, while being started on the original Xbox, is more of an innovation than the Wii controller. And then there's Kinect, which is somewhat of a rip off of the Wii controller, but IMO far better implemented and more pleasing to use.

LIVE could be seen as innovation indeed, I'll give you that.
I referred to Kinect with that "Microsoft less so" as they developed the concept a bit further by turning player into the controller.
It's not rare that the "ripoffs" are in fact better, since their developers already know what the competition have when they start to develop their solution, and know what they have to have, and then can add something on top of it / polish it more etc

 

[bgassassin]

Blah. Nintendo is too conservative of a company for me to like, and their "innovations" are gimmicks. I really hope this guy isn't serious when he says it is for the market to decide, and showing so much arrogance. Nintendo is in a very tricky place right now, what with stale hardware that has lost its steam and could end up #2 in sales this gen. We have whispers from devs that say the WiiU is more powerful than PS360 but not by a lot. I really hope that not to be the case and that Nintendo is smart enough to put at least a beefy GPU in the system and it not be crippled. They really need to let the Wii fade into oblivion when the Wii U comes out and focus on that, especially since the other guys will be releasing their much more powerful systems not too long after WiiU drops. They are so tight lipped about their hardware that it's nigh on impossible to get details on it. You'd think more would have leaked by now, so my hope is that they are still improving on the machine. Has there been any news when WiiU will go into production?

Then again, this could be their Dreamcast.......and if that's the case I hope their transition to software only is more graceful than my beloved former employer.

The part in bold is one of the more asinine comments I see around the Interwebs (definitely not limited to just you). Based on what you said you more than anyone should know that the circumstances that occurred to cause Dreamcast's failure are nowhere near what Nintendo has gone through.

Now that I've vented a little , I think some of those early dev comments were based on what Nintendo told them. For example if you heard a CPU description that was like this "Triple core PPC with SMT (2 threads per core) w/ 3MB of L2 cache", I assume the first thing people think of is that it's just a slightly better Xenon. But with everything I've heard my guess is that they are targeting the "3.5Ghz OoO" CPU that MS wanted Xenon to be. Considering how long they've supposedly been working on it (unlike MS who allowed a smaller window), they should be able to get it.

As for specs taking the bits and pieces I've heard I see it looking something like this:

CPU
Tri-core (POWER7-based cores) @ 3+Ghz
3MB L2 cache (split 1.5MB:768KB:768KB; maybe they'll increase this before launch)

GPU
600-800Mhz
640-800 SPUs
(I really think Nintendo is trying for a 28nm GPU)

Memory
32MB of embedded 1T-SRAM-Q
1.5GB of GDDR5 memory

What's interesting is that one of the CPU cores acts like a "master" core to the other two cores and it has more cache than the other two. The split amounts are my guess.

And from what I've been able to gather, it sounds like production has not started yet.

 

[wco81]

If Nintendo went software-only, would their software sales be much greater?

Wii was very profitable but the Game Cube wasn't nearly as profitable.

Let's say Nintendo released 4 Mario games which sold a combined 60 million units during the life of the Wii. I don't know if the numbers are greater or lower -- these are numbers just for discussion's sake.

If Nintendo also released those 4 Mario games on the other systems, how much more sales would those games have seen? Or is it that those games got people to buy the Nintendo systems so the sales numbers on Sony and MS systems would have added 20% to the sales on the Wii?

Or if Nintendo went software-only, would it have seen lower sales on Sony and MS systems combined than they would have gotten as an exclusive on a Nintendo console? Or would the number have been about the same or greater than a Nintendo-only release?

 

[patsu]

European Wii sales pass 30 million mark
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-01-10-european-wii-sales-pass-30-million-mark

Nintendo also announced new worldwide Wii balance board sales of 41.98 million. The peripheral is bundled with Wii Fit and Wii Fit Plus. The sales split is 22.67 million for Wii Fit, and 19.31 million for Wii Fit Plus.

Nintendo should be able to tap on all these Wiimotes, Wiiboard, DS/3DS footprint to enhance WiiU experiences. I like their golfing demo (Leave WiiU pad on the floor to show ball location, and Wiimote to swing the club).

 

[patsu]

Skyrim Streaming On Android Tablets
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/...a-gets-skyrim-working-on-android-tablets.aspx

During Nvidia’s press conference, the graphics processor company brought professional gamer Johnathan Wendel, A.K.A. Fatal1ty, on the stage to play Skyrim on an Asus Transfomer Prime tablet. Nvidia was actually running Skyrim off a PC, and using the streaming service Splashtop to project the game onto the tablet, but the game looked like it was running pretty smooth and playable even through wifi, and we can’t wait to test this functionality while on the road.

 

[Rodéric]

Nintendo should be able to tap on all these Wiimotes, Wiiboard, DS/3DS footprint to enhance WiiU experiences. I like their golfing demo (Leave WiiU pad on the floor to show ball location, and Wiimote to swing the club).

The idea of putting such a device on the floor and play next to it is unappealing to say the least, way too dangerous for the device.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

When is Nintendo's presentantion during this CES?

(EDIT: Sorry, I said E3 but I meant CEBIT)
(EDIT2: Terribly sorry, I actually meant CES, duh)

 

[patsu]

The idea of putting such a device on the floor and play next to it is unappealing to say the least, way too dangerous for the device.

Will it be fragile ? I stepped on iPad, PSP a few times with no bad consequences. Video game golf seems tame.

When I play Move Golf, I lose the ball if I look elsewhere. Breaks the immersion somewhat. First time I saw WiiU's game concept trailer, I was wowed by Nintendo's creativity.

 

[AlNom]

Will it be fragile ? I stepped on iPad, PSP a few times with no bad consequences.

Is the cost of those devices related in any way to how sturdy they will be compared to this game controller?

 

[patsu]

Depends. If it's playable by kids, then it should be durable and perhaps drool resistance. ^_^

 

[AlNom]

Well, one other thing to consider is the actual structural design of the devices. iPad is a pretty compact device with perhaps little to no empty space within it that would make it less prone to caving in or cracking from an externally applied force at any given point. The frame underneath is also metal so... Anyways, same goes for PSP in that these two devices can essentially be seen as a solid block from a structural engineering POV. Your feet or toes are going to be a pretty low pressure if you consider force applied per area of contact. What I mean is that the WiiU pad may be structurally weaker if it's mostly hollow (compared to the other two) and be less tolerant to similar applied forces, but you'd actually have to put your weight on it. I'm sure if you lost balance you'd naturally try to shift your weight elsewhere if you were conscious of the pad being stepped on. It's probably not a big deal either way...

Conventional controllers by comparison can distribute any force applied to the curvature of the design to some extent. I'd actually consider the dual shock less sturdy due to how the handles/grips attach to the main body (angular as opposed to being more curved ala the Xbox controllers), but that's a different type of consideration (trying to break the thing apart, not just applying pressure on a point).