Nintendo GOing Forward.

[Grall]

An el cheapo super terrible locked-down, DRM'd Nintendo console for emerging markets isn't going to be a very big hit, not with android smartphones getting cheaper and cheaper and better and better, whilst simultaneously being wide open to piracy.

Nintendo sees the $1 game as the scourge of the earth; they've said as much in the past. Yet this is the only way they'd ever make any headway whatsoever into "emerging markets". Would they bite that bullet? I don't think so. Any money they'd make from that would be absolute peanuts.

They're still believing they can sell $30+ games to people using their locked-down proprietary platform as a vehicle, I'm betting. And, I'd be hellishly surprised if it actually worked.

 

[milk]

To me all this just paints the picture that Nintendo is oficially clueless. There is no doubt at this point. The guys there just stayed too long inside their bubble doing their own thing, and now that they had to adapt, they have no idea of whats happening.

 

[Rangers]

An el cheapo super terrible locked-down, DRM'd Nintendo console for emerging markets isn't going to be a very big hit, not with android smartphones getting cheaper and cheaper and better and better, whilst simultaneously being wide open to piracy.

Nintendo sees the $1 game as the scourge of the earth; they've said as much in the past. Yet this is the only way they'd ever make any headway whatsoever into "emerging markets". Would they bite that bullet? I don't think so. Any money they'd make from that would be absolute peanuts.

They're still believing they can sell $30+ games to people using their locked-down proprietary platform as a vehicle, I'm betting. And, I'd be hellishly surprised if it actually worked.

I think the Android Micro-console-ish model could work great for them, and not just in emerging markets but everywhere. But that's if they did it right, and there's absolutely zero chance they'd do it right.

 

[wco81]

Give up on the hardware business. What would be the point of making Mario look better than what their current hardware can render? That art style isn't for detailed shaders or tessellating the details of his nostrils, rather than leave it as a simple shape.

And any kind of dedicated gaming device is a non starter.

 

[Globalisateur]

Maybe Nintendo idea about "cheaper hardware" is by removing Wii and DS backward compatibility in respective new revisions of Wii U and 3DS?

Spoiler

Eureka?

 

[Grall]

There probably isn't much wii compatiblity that can be removed without breaking wuu compatibility... It's apparantly dual function all of it. There's the on-chip SRAM blocks for framebuffer and texture cache, I've no idea if they fill any function at all during wuu mode. Would seem very weird to just have them dangling there like a weird, useless appendix and taking up (a tiny bit of) die space, although if engineered true to wii specs they might be too low performant to be of much use for the wuu.

Getting rid of them would be horrifically cost inefficient for the money saved though, it would require re-jigging the entire chip, going through verification all over again (months of expensive, time-consuming work), and the die space saved is as mentioned quite tiny on the whole. Firmware for the wuu would have to be modified and re-verified as well after pruning out the wii bits; more costly work.

Also, is there any DS hardware at all inside the 3DS...? I can imagine the processors used in the 3DS could run DS games through software emulation, the DS is so damn primitive.

 

[Exophase]

Also, is there any DS hardware at all inside the 3DS...? I can imagine the processors used in the 3DS could run DS games through software emulation, the DS is so damn primitive.

At least most if not all of the DS hardware is present in 3DS. Reverse engineering efforts have revealed at least one ARM9 in 3DS. And I've performed several tests using a 3DS in DS mode where it gets all the weird little quirks of the original DS GPU right. There's no way that the PICA200 GPU could emulate the DS GPU so accurately and there's no way that the CPUs would be fast enough to emulate it in software. 3DS probably wouldn't be fast enough to emulate DS even if the 3D part was done in hardware.

 

[Grall]

Wow! Okay, cool. Still, how much of the die would be taken up by this stuff?

(Oh and btw, didn't Nintendo say they were developing NEW hardware anyway for this project?)

 

[Globalisateur]

There probably isn't much wii compatiblity that can be removed without breaking wuu compatibility... It's apparantly dual function all of it. There's the on-chip SRAM blocks for framebuffer and texture cache, I've no idea if they fill any function at all during wuu mode. Would seem very weird to just have them dangling there like a weird, useless appendix and taking up (a tiny bit of) die space, although if engineered true to wii specs they might be too low performant to be of much use for the wuu.

Getting rid of them would be horrifically cost inefficient for the money saved though, it would require re-jigging the entire chip, going through verification all over again (months of expensive, time-consuming work), and the die space saved is as mentioned quite tiny on the whole. Firmware for the wuu would have to be modified and re-verified as well after pruning out the wii bits; more costly work.

Also, is there any DS hardware at all inside the 3DS...? I can imagine the processors used in the 3DS could run DS games through software emulation, the DS is so damn primitive.

For Wii U, not all of it. The CPU + 24MB main memory yes.

But for what I could learn from the specs + die shots + feedback, not the rest of if: Vram 2MB + 1MB + (suspected) Wii GPU are potentially unused in Wii U games.

EDIT: apparently the 2MB is used in Wii U games as a fast ram.

 

[Grall]

Nintendo has claimed that the wii GPU is not duplicated (in its entirety) in the wuu.

Even if it's actually there though, it would be a monumental task taking it out, and not much point in it. Such primitive hardware takes up very little space on a modern silicon process, and crafting a new IC (which is what this would be, from an engineering standpoint) is very costly and takes many months. Then manufacturing and assembly takes months, you have to verify the chip, re-spin it if it doesn't work properly... If it doesn't you need to fab a new chip and re-test, months of delays, mountains of cash wasted. It all becomes a LOT of money for no real benefit; the wuu sells so poorly that chip orders will be small. Savings will be correspondingly small, while the fixed costs of developing this new chip will be huge.

Nintendo would be better off to just re-package the old wii hardware yet one more time; the wuu is too advanced and expensive to build with its tablet full of subsystems that can't be cost-reduced.

 

[Exophase]

Wow! Okay, cool. Still, how much of the die would be taken up by this stuff?

Probably not a lot. There were 7 years between DS and 3DS's release, that's a lot of time for die shrinks. Especially for parts that aren't getting a clock boost and were at low clocks even for their time, they could be more aggressively optimized for area.

I suspect in the original design one of the biggest area consumers was the internal RAM, of which there was a little over 1MB split over several functions. This they could have probably transparently reused for 3DS functionality somewhere.

(Oh and btw, didn't Nintendo say they were developing NEW hardware anyway for this project?)

Did they? I don't think they said very much about it. Maybe that it'd be different hardware in the sense that it won't run existing games.

 

[wco81]

Ideas to save Nintendo, which has $3 billion in cash but is seeing deteriorating finances as sales lag:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/05/how-wed-save-nintendo/

Nothing which hasn't been discussed already.

 

[Wynix]

Here's an idea, Apple offers Nintendo a deal to be exclusive to Apple hardware.
Apple pays Nintendo ~$1.5Bil per year on a 10 year contract, Nintendo retains IP rights and Apple only takes the normal 30% cut from software transactions.

BOOM.

 

[Grall]

To make Apple part with $1.5bn per year's gonna take more magic shrooms than even Super Mario kan swallow, I think.

 

[fehu]

How much can cost developing a console in the range of ps4?
Just R&D

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Here's an idea, Apple offers Nintendo a deal to be exclusive to Apple hardware.
Apple pays Nintendo ~$1.5Bil per year on a 10 year contract, Nintendo retains IP rights and Apple only takes the normal 30% cut from software transactions.

BOOM.

Would 30% be enough to get their money back, let alone be profitable?

 

[liolio]

Does anybody know in which countries the wiimini is available?

I would not be too surprised if new hardware is repackage wii mini launched in new territories.

It makes no sense for Nintendo to develop new hardware and software only for emerging market. Not too mention that they need a healthy range of cheap titles to broaden the product appeal.

Imo nothing to see here just trying to rub the investors bellies...

 

[Wynix]

Would 30% be enough to get their money back, let alone be profitable?

Initially, no; Though i think it is possible if they work together and leverage all of Nintendo's IP.
They could easily dominate the F2P market if they adopt good micro-transaction philosophies.

I think the deal would be more about platform advertisement and swaying people who otherwise would have went for an android alternative.

This would also be hugely beneficial to AppleTV(for obvious reasons) and perhaps even the ipod touch, and once they have invested into the Apple ecosystem it is likely to entice them to purchase more Apple products in the future.

Additionally this could have enormous influence of the younger audience.

Also all the advertising Nintendo does will be advertisements for Apple products.
Apple is big in Japan, this would easily make them even bigger.

 

[wco81]

They can't expect to charge $40 or more for their games on iPads as they do on their devices.

The market prices for games on mobile devices are much lower, especially if we're talking about them first porting all their back catalog.

 

[Wynix]

They can't expect to charge $40 or more for their games on iPads as they do on their devices.

The market prices for games on mobile devices are much lower, especially if we're talking about them first porting all their back catalog.

I have no idea why people assume they wouldn't try alternate pricing schemes.