Is there room for the Wii U in this gen?

[slacey1070]

If they want to play them that much, they can.on the Wii u for less than £200.

I wonder if ninty rolled out say a new Zelda on the xbone at £55 how many of these blogs would buy it?

Are you seriously arguing that nobody wants to play Mario or Zelda games any more? Because that's a bold statement.

No, that's not what I'm saying... People can play them now. They just don't seem to want to buy a console to do it. Therefore, they can't want to play them that much.

I bet the same bloggers would moan if they were on ps4.... Such is human nature.

People said the same about Sega....

[Lost Dragon]

Regarding issue of 'Why don't Nintendo just bankroll some major companies to produce exclusives for Wii U...'

Did'nt MS initally try something similar with Xbox in Japan? (basically going upto Japanese developers with open cheque book and saying, ok, how much for the company to develop games only for Xbox (and indeed the company itself) and this did'nt go down well at all, as this just was'nt how buisness was done in Japan and it alienated MS even more).

Plus MS had a big 'Only on Xbox...' marketing push with it's exclusives on Xbox at the time, but speaking as an Xbox owner, they were a very mixed bag, Blinx, Brute Force (god i bought that on day 1 as well), Vodoo Vince, Dino Crisis 3 etc, did'nt really do anything to help sell the system did it?

So just buying up exclusives is not, i feel going to reverse Wii u's fortunes, sadly.

[ToxieDogg]

[General Opulence]

GC most powerful console of its generation? Not from where i was standing and i owned all 3 consoles, even multi format games most times looked the best on the Xbox.

[ToxieDogg]

GC most powerful console of its generation? Not from where i was standing and i owned all 3 consoles, even multi format games most times looked the best on the Xbox.

Yeah, me too (I still do own them) and I'd agree with that, the pic up there is only a bit of fun that I pulled off Facebook to give people a couple of things to think about.

[killbot]

GC most powerful console of its generation? Not from where i was standing and i owned all 3 consoles, even multi format games most times looked the best on the Xbox.

It is a bit of a fabrication, but I think the point is that (unlike the Wii and Wii U) it was roughly on a par with the competition.

The point stands - everyone says that Nintendo would clean up with a console that has technical parity with its rivals and features no 'gimmicky' control mechanism. Only they did release that console, it was called the Gamecube, and it didn't sell very many units. Thus proving this theory to be complete bollocks.

[r0jaws]

It's true enough, there's no need for another xbox/ ps, Nintendo have to market to their strengths and work on what makes them different from the other 2.

[Lost Dragon]

In terms of hardware, GameCube CPU used copper interconnects, rather than the usual aluminium wiring to connect the chips millions of transistors, so benifited from newer chip manufacturing technology, that Sony did'nt have the luxury of, when producing the PS2.It was basically a customised Power PC 750 processor, just designed for console and thus was ideal as it used less power and produced less heat.Initally clocking in at 405 Mhz, Nintendo fine-tuned it to 485 Mhz for final production.

The GPU, like the cPU was designed to be easy to use, powerful, yet cheap to make.One of it's key strength's was the large amount of very fast on-chip memory for graphics processing, but even this was'nt enough for some developers,m see note later...

Whole hardware design was based around productivity over raw performance, basically you could get a game up and running quicker and using less tools on GC than say PS2 approach where Sony gave you a lot of raw power, but you had to allocate it where you saw fit yourself.

Lot of developers found the GC's Application Programming Interface (API) far easier to work with than say developing for PC/Xbox via Direct X, but you were limited to fixed function nature of the hardware, so if you wanted a custom effect on PS2, Sony's harware let you mould the raw power to create that effect, it just took time, with GC, you had to try and get fixed hardware to emulate an effect you wanted.

David Braben put the GC as being a lot faster than PS2, but was'nt overly happy with it's smaller main memory (Xbox had 64 Mb unified memory, PS2 32Mb Ram for graphics, GC only had 24 Mb for GPU, plus some fast on-chip memory)

Looks like GC VS PS2 was swings and roundabouts...PS2 had higher fillrate, faster at clipping polys to screen, but lacked the multi-texturing GC offered.Gamecube had better caching than Xbox, but if you wanted to do crazy-ass particle effects, or crazy maths as developers put it, raw power of PS2 was your best bet.


So in terms of which of the 3 was 'more powerful' really depended on what you were looking to achive in terms of visuals.

[Lost Dragon]

Looking at past marketing though, Nintendo really seemed on the ball with GBA SP, going after the gadget-obsessed 20 something male.Big ads in likes of FHM, The Face, Maxim etc, all done in a black and white imagery fashion, looking more like Calvin Klein frangrance adverts....GBA For Men (feel free to stare ladies, which one takes your fancy? etc etc) tacky..perhaps, but it seemed to work.

That and the hardware re-design which made the SP look far 'cooler' than the original GBA.So rather than just add a backlight to original design, Nintendo re-engineered the device from a hardware and marketing point of view.

Perhaps this is whats needed for the Wii U?

New revamp and new marketing.Try and sell it to new demographic?

[Mootown]

It doesn't matter how much money you splash into marketing spend if the console doesn't have what people want to buy - marketing is not the answer, you can't market something that no-one wants and make them want it when it's such a high cost product. First, you need something people actually want (ie modern 'realistic' games seem to be the sellers right now). THEN you market it to reach the critical mass. The problem is, Wii U currently does not have products that resonate with the mass market, it only has products that really appeal to Nintendo fans in respect of being strong enough of a driver to force a hardware purchase. A ton of folk want to play Mario 3D World, but they don't want to spend £300 for the pleasure, they want to play it AS WELL as the FPS, Sports etc games too. It doesn't surprise me that Mario hasn't been a huge hardware sales driver, it's driven SOME sales sure, but certainly not enough to tip the scales.

For the record though, I really love my Wii U. It does pretty much everything I want in a Nintendo console, including play all my Wii games via HDMI. (Basically, my Wii U has the ability to play all of the 3D Mario games on it barring Sunshine, so for a platform fan it's f**king ace) But I can see why it's not capturing the mass market attention.

[Lost Dragon]

Gunpei Yoko designed the Game Boy did he not? my understanding being that he saw just how successfull the LCD range of Game And Watches had become and you could replace these with a battery-friendly, cartridge based handheld that could easily fit in your pocket and backed up by very clever marketing (again black and white lifestyle-type adverts), Nintendo had a device that destroyed all that came before it, but his vision on that one device did not seem to translate to future attempts:

Virtual Boy and Bandai Wonderswan...so i guess sometimes it's a bloody nightmare to predict just where you should be looking, in terms of R+D for your next big seller.You either offer something totally different or try and compete on levl playing field and hope your software is enough to draw the punters to your product over the competition.

I've see claims that even in 1999, in UK alone, Gameboy had shifted some 900,547 GB consoles and 2,226,000 games! (compared to say SNK Neo Geo Colour pocket with 30,000 consoles and 120,000 games sold in same period in UK), and this from an 8 bit console knocking on some 10 years+ in age.

Could anyone have predicted just how well GB would really sell when it 1st launched and for just how long it'd keep selling?

Nintendo must be looking for that 'lightning in a bottle' that they had which sold the GB, DS,Wii, SNES and NES.

Here you had a mix of low tech (GB), higher tech than your rivial (SNES more colours, better sound etc than MD, PC Eng), gimmick (2 screens, touch screen, motion control etc).There just does'nt seem to be 1 set answer as to what's the right area to look at, for any given era.

[outdated_gamer]

Those GC games didn't have online play, they only had LAN play. I remember no online on GC was a pretty big criticism later in it's time, considering the GC did get a broadband adapter and 3rd party services/programs like the "Warp Pipe" existed and offered online play on GC. It also got some criticism for using "mini DVDs" which offered less storage than regular DVDs, meaning that devs had to compress and/or release games on multiple discs (it wasn't nearly as big issue as the N64's cartridges though). Otherwise it was a pretty well-built and "balanced" system, but to get great results out of it devs had to be skilled (e.g. Factor 5's Rogue Squadron games, which exhibited huge poly-counts and next-generational effects). But this still hasn't prevented the 3rd parties "jumping ship" and the system getting limited 3rd party support (including losing some key 3rd party exclusives like Resident Evil 4). The 3rd parties beef with Nintendo extends far further than we're willing to admit here, all the way to the NES and SNES, which were popular and well-supported systems, but the truth is that several 3rd party devs already felt that Nintendo's policies were too restrictive and gladly "jumped ship" when given the opportunity (which rival companies like Sega and, especially, Sony offered). Nintendo tried to re-claim the 3rd party support later on but apparently the damage was already done and couldn't be fully fixed. Additionally, the gaming audience and press decided to go snobby on the GC and declared it "kiddy" due to it's default color choice and in-ability to run DVDs, which was apparently a requirement for a modern console from the PS2 onwards. It also didn't help that it's "big" games like Wind Waker, Mario Sunshine and Metroid Prime didn't really resonate with the general gaming public. There was quite an outrage about Wind Waker's "cartoony" visuals and likewise, a lot of people were disappointed with Mario and Metroid, expecting more of what they were used to. There were reports of people returning Metroid Prime back to the stores because it "wasn't like Halo" and such issues.

Regardless, the GC still had some nice games like WW, both Primes, Sunshine, F-Zero GX, Star Fox Adventures, Eternal Darkness, Resident Evil Remake, ect. And considering the Wii U can't run GC games, some of these could be good material for HD re-releases with some extra features.

[outdated_gamer]

It doesn't matter how much money you splash into marketing spend if the console doesn't have what people want to buy - marketing is not the answer, you can't market something that no-one wants and make them want it when it's such a high cost product. First, you need something people actually want (ie modern 'realistic' games seem to be the sellers right now). THEN you market it to reach the critical mass. The problem is, Wii U currently does not have products that resonate with the mass market, it only has products that really appeal to Nintendo fans in respect of being strong enough of a driver to force a hardware purchase. A ton of folk want to play Mario 3D World, but they don't want to spend £300 for the pleasure, they want to play it AS WELL as the FPS, Sports etc games too. It doesn't surprise me that Mario hasn't been a huge hardware sales driver, it's driven SOME sales sure, but certainly not enough to tip the scales.

For the record though, I really love my Wii U. It does pretty much everything I want in a Nintendo console, including play all my Wii games via HDMI. (Basically, my Wii U has the ability to play all of the 3D Mario games on it barring Sunshine, so for a platform fan it's f**king ace) But I can see why it's not capturing the mass market attention.

I have to admit the more I'm thinking about it the more I see that Nintendo just can't cater to the same demographic that likes the PS and Xbox. They'd have to turn their whole house philosophy on the head in order to attempt it and even then there's no guarantee they'd be successful at it.

So yes, Nintendo can't compete directly with Sony and MS, they have to attempt to be different to the other guys.

[Nemesis]

If they want to play them that much, they can.on the Wii u for less than £200.

I wonder if ninty rolled out say a new Zelda on the xbone at £55 how many of these blogs would buy it?

Are you seriously arguing that nobody wants to play Mario or Zelda games any more? Because that's a bold statement.

No, that's not what I'm saying... People can play them now. They just don't seem to want to buy a console to do it. Therefore, they can't want to play them that much.

It's funny that some think Mario Kart 8 will reverse the Wii U's fortunes single handedly. We've had Super Mario 3D world, New Super Mario Bros U, Wind Maker Remake & New Super Luigi U and all of them have tanked at retail.

Maybe MK8 will reverse some or much of the damage but I can't help feeling that another reason why Nintendo is failing is because they're stuck in the past. Relying too much on their own IP to get their hardware out of trouble. When this tactic fails, what then?

[sirpigmeat]

I don't think you can blame nintendo too much for thinking that releasing great versions of past
franchises that have had massive sales as little a couple years ago might sell a few consoles.
Popular exclusive titles do sell consoles too, its not really an outdated tactic...
Also the titles that have released increased sales in Japan by 87 percent or was it 67 percent...
As a first strike against poor sales it was reasonably effective...

Their seems to be alot of pundits slagging Nintendo of for having outdated business models
that as far as I can see are still used by Xbox and PS quite effectivley and also worked
perfectly fine for Nintendo last generation.