Nintendo's hardware choice philosophy *spawn

[AzaK]

I guess we could say that Nintendo sacrificed sideways compatibility for backwards compatibility. If the Wii U was a 'turn key' port machine then I don't see why we would have any future 2013 title without already announced Wii U versions.

I also wonder actually if publishers are deliberately avoiding ports in order to ensure that the core userbase remains on the Xbox and Playstation platforms and hence keeping them predictable.

I wouldn't think they'd avoid ports for that reason because a sale is a sale (assuming they get the same profit from each)

The window for the Wii U that they actually delivered closed a few years ago for developers and publishers standpoint. UK is the only place we have second week sales and dear lord it looks brutal for the future

Nintendo totally blew a huge chance here. They needed good OS and sufficient specs to deliver a new "PS2"

Nintendo could have had a big jump on Sony/MS if they had released a PS4 lite in 2012. All they needed to do was communicate those generic PC like specs to devs in early 2011 and im confident they wouldnt be sitting here wondering why there is no support

The pricing for such machine could be easily the same as Wii U currently. They could have even take $100 loss for the first year to build that base. It only would have costed $1B for 10 million machines which isnt too bad

A couple of years after the Wii released a number of people (me included) thought Nintendo should have released a 360 lite. Basically modern capabilities but lower specs. That would have enabled them to make lots of money and have more titles on the system. Hopefully they haven't designed themselves out of ports.

1 Billion out of their 10 cash reserves is quite a lot, but I agree with your general point. They should have taken a bigger loss to put a little more hardware in their system so ports were on parity even through brute force. It's nearly there but not quite. After a year costs come down and they would then be generating more profit.

It's almost like they nearly got it right, but just missed the bar for those ports.

We know that AC3 and BLOPS ports run pretty well on WiiU.
We don't know how much work was involved, or how much work would be involved for games that stress different aspects of the PS360.
Some engines are probably better suited to WiiU ports that others.

If publishers are playing wait and see, it means they have no faith in the platform, Ubi did really well out of Wii early on because many of the other publishers ignored it, expecting it to fail. I'm actually surprised we aren't seeing more 3rd party support, given a relatively low cost of entry, seems like a decent risk to me.
It might just be opportunity cost, if your shipping a Wii version those engineers aren't shipping something else, and if we believe that next-gen titles are already in development, there probably isn'y an engineering surplus.

From what we hear, kits have been out for about 12-18 months so I don't think it's a time issue. The big publishers have the resources but they are still holding back. It is a small install base and we've seen a few sad sales figures for some games, but that can only get better as more units sell. If Nintendo hit there 5.5 million by 31 March, then a port getting 5% of an attach rate will give them 200K+ units sales. If they're a dev/pub that gets about $25-$30 of the $60 price tag, that's 5-6 million. Spending a million or two on a port is still a healthy return IMO.

Publishers should not take this whole "wait and see" approach - have they been blind to the last generation? Sure they don't want to saturate the launch too much but we're past that, and the risk is pretty low.

 

[liolio]

Publishers should not take this whole "wait and see" approach - have they been blind to the last generation? Sure they don't want to saturate the launch too much but we're past that, and the risk is pretty low.

What hapenned last gen? To me it looks like Nintendo took most of money made by the Wii whereas it is not true for either the 360 or the PS3.

 

[ERP]

If Nintendo hit there 5.5 million by 31 March, then a port getting 5% of an attach rate will give them 200K+ units sales. If they're a dev/pub that gets about $25-$30 of the $60 price tag, that's 5-6 million. Spending a million or two on a port is still a healthy return IMO.

Sure if you coud sell 200K units of a port you'd probably do it, unless you think the engineering resources are better spent elsewhere.
But go check how many titles sell to 5% of the installed base, that would be about 3.5M units on 360, you can count the number of titles in a year with that sort of penetration on the fingers on one hand.
Ports at launch are a difficult proposition, the odds are most won't sell outside their launch window, because anyone who wants it will buy it on a platform they own, so your looking at whatever the installed base is when you ship. Successful launch games are usually platform exclusives, or games with legs.
Ubi made money on Wii early on because of the dearth of Wii titles, and someone will likely do the same this time.
What really matters IMO is how Nintendo is doing coming out of the XMas where 720/PS4 ship, they'll undoubtedly get their key franchises on the platform for that Xmas the question is will it be enough to given them momentum moving forwards.

 

[Squilliam]

I wouldn't think they'd avoid ports for that reason because a sale is a sale (assuming they get the same profit from each)

They can already assume that people interested in those kinds of games already have a PS/360/PC they can play it on. Also there could be an engineer shortage as ERP said because they are hard at work creating and fine tuning next generation engines.