Do you remember this? Back in the day when they tried to make hardcore gamers happy? The Wii this gen has been perhaps the most successful flop in history. Nintendo took a gimmick approach with this, clearly that more "casual" people would maybe consider, waggle. What happened though was the old R&D budget didn't allow them to pack power under the hood of the Wii. Most of it's games are appalling to look at. Many of them don't utilize the gimmick properly. And most don't have the depth expected by hardcore gamers. Not saying hardcore gamers don't want quirky games, but that's something easily covered by handhelds, cellphones, and XBLM and PSN can offer to us. The lack of power under the hood further crippled something even more critical for the hardcores, third-party relations. These people just don't want to put their high-powered hits on the machine. Be it because of the horribly clunky "standard controls", the wonky "bounding boxes", the lack of power to recreate physics and AI elements, or just that they don't want their game to look horrible. Nintendo has never been well liked by 3rd parties, for sure, but when even your incredible sales don't warrant developers AAA main stage titles, there's a problem here.
So, as many of us know, we're due to see Nintendo's "Next-Gen" system at this upcoming E3. Rumors flew from being more powerful than the current machines as in a proper generational jump, to being "slightly more powerful" than just the xbox 360. Of course it wouldn't be Nintendo now without some gimmick, and rumors show that they are looking to put a rather large touchscreen LDC into each control. Sure, this has many applications that can be fun like inventory management, character status, maps and so on, but remember this is going to impact cost of the hardware. Assuming now that a controller may cost around $10 in parts for a manufacturer, add in another $50+ to a controller is going to impact the final cost of the hardware. This expended budget per machine could have been used for buffing up the machine's power via CPU, GPU, or even RAM. Why do I know that Nintendo won't do all of these? Simple: They like money. They've been known to launch their machines at break-even or profitable day-1 pricing. Figure the regular history of machines, even going by the Wii, take it's launch price of $250, add in their cost of the fancy new controller, you're looking at a price-point that won't cater to the masses, and if the console doesn't have the punch, you can't expect hardcores who normally are the ones to drop their cash on $300-400 and beyond priced machines to run out and get this.
It's certainly possible that Nintendo really shot themselves in the foot here, and sent the next machine out to die here. Launching almost certainly a year sooner than both next-gen machines from Sony and MS, it's very safe to assume it's going to be outdated the minute those machines hit the shelves, or even when their specs are unveiled. The other issue is we'll KNOW what's under the next Nintendo machine, and by time it hits shelves, we'll be bound to know what Sony and MS are going to be bringing to us, both of which are known to love putting power in their boxes. The hardcore may just wait for their machines to hit, or see the specs before running out and buying the new Nintendo system. Also, if this system is outclassed power-wise, along with still not having a proper online network, 3rd parties may once again look past their offering, indirectly impacting if the hardcore go to said machine again.
So while this article is small, and quickly written, it's more of my personal speculations of what we'll see. Once we do see what we have, I'll certainly be able to go more in depth with my thoughts. But once again, I'm skeptical of Nintendo here, and sadly not expecting much just like the majority of people hitting the forums discussing this topic. Perhaps we'll see Nintendo return to glory, or they will once again forget about us, the people that made them what they are today, the hardcore gamer.
No comments:
Post a Comment