Nintendo's next gen strategy for home & mobile

[Exophase]

Of course. Gameboy was a powerful brand that everyone recognized in 2004. Yet Nintendo comes in and announces the DS.
Imagine apple announcing in their next keynote that they will discontinue the iphone brand and replace it with "Apple PS". Do you think their investors would like that idea?

But in this case calling it Gameboy would have panicked investors too, possibly even more, because Nintendo was doing new and strange things with it. If they called it Gameboy they couldn't have made the empty claims that another Gameboy was coming, so no need to worry too much about this DS experiment.

No. From "absorbing the Wii U architecture" in a CPU/GPU context, I take it to mean there will be backwards compatibility with the Wii U.

When they mention CPU and GPU they're not simply talking about architecture. The CPU/GPU used in Wii were almost identical to the ones in Gamecube. If they were just talking about architecture then they wouldn't have listed this as the exception. If they were just talking about backwards compatibility they wouldn't have listed this as the exception. And if they were just talking about the difficulty in migrating between consoles and handhelds then they wouldn't have listed a console to console migration as the exception.

For something that's as unambiguous as you think it is we sure are reading it differently.

 

[Goodtwin]

No. Just no. Nothing Nintendo said gave any kind of credence to those BS specs. They're garbage for a whole bunch of reasons.

Backwards compatibility has nothing to do with what Nintendo said in the first place. Nintendo already has that with Wii U. Claiming that they'll attain backwards compatibility again by including the CPU separately is not exactly an inspired idea. But I think if they have any sense they'll do a real SoC and that may be challenging to do while keeping any kind of PPC cores, because IBM doesn't have experience porting them to other processes and GPU/SoC makers don't have experience with IBM's process.

Yea, your probably right.

 

[Melqart]

I remember when the DS was announced as a third pillar. It was different enough from the GBA that I believed them and it didn't really appeal to me or many gamers and fans compared with the PSP. Calling it a third pillar was a safe way of marketing a risky new product in case it didn't work out (for a while in its first year it didn't look like it would work out). When it became highly successful, they 'officially' made it a successor to the GB line.

Anyways, I think there is value in BC for Nintendo if they intend to offer their complete library of legacy titles for download. Without compatible hardware, offering Wii U, Wii, and Gamecube titles would likely be impossible. I don't know how long Hexadrive was working on Okami HD for PS3, but again Nintendo and Hexadrive made a very polished HD port of Zelda:WW in six months and I would think things like the CPU being the same architecture helped in this case. Since it sold a million copies, I expect more of these.