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Wii U


deanb
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28 members have voted

  1. 1. Buying a Wii U?

    • Pre-ordered/will buy before launch
    • I'm waiting for a specific franchise announcement
    • Will buy it when cheaper
    • Probably not buying
    • Definitely not buying
    • Flipping it


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Maybe Nintendo WILL go the way of Sega...

 

Part of me hopes that happens, so I don't have to buy Nintendo hardware for Nintendo games in the future, but another part of me is afraid their games would suffer in quality if that happened.

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Given that, beyond the controllers, the competitors consoles are many magnitudes more advanced I can only see their games getting better. Online play would improve drastically for one. Their developers would still be mostly the same guys. Also their handheld arm would likely remain still.

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They're still a publicly traded company, and thus profit focused. Their titles would be pushing themselves. Even more so given they'd be competing up against a much wider variety of games.

 

Right, pushing themselves and only themselves.  No more would be riding on say Mario Kart than just the success of Mario Kart, whereas now how good each game is affects the success of the entire platform.

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But the platform is Nintendo. If the quality of Nintendo games were to dip upon becoming a third party studio then people would be less inclined to buy Nintendo games in future, so each game does affect the rest. It's that way with all studios. (see the discussion in ACM thread)

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The order to get rid of consoles? MS, Sony and lastly Nintendo.

 

Since LIVE MS has brought nothing to the party, and the fact that they're so desperate to get rid of the games bit out of the games console tell me everything I need to know about their feelings on the medium.

 

I think Sony for all their faults does push games to sell their hardware. They invest a lot in making exclusive games. MS just buy timed exclusives for the sole purpose of screwing over other gamers. And while Sony add the other stuff to make a complete package and compare with their competitors their focus is still clearly games - just look at the different focus of PS+ to LIVE Gold.

 

When people think about Nintendo hardware nowadays all they seem to think is "I hate waggle". They forget about all the other innovations, and even the fact that although they do make odd hardware decisions, non of their pre-Wii consoles were underpowered. The Wii was underpowered because they decided they were chasing a losing battle. Hardcore gamers wouldn't touch a nintendo console because it's for kids, even if it had comparable power so they went for a different market. It worked - which is something a lot of people also seem to forget when they're talking about that generation, just because they weren't interested in it. Which kind of proved Nintendo made the right decision.

 

If one of the other two dropped out of the hardware market so Nintendo was competing more directly with it's competiors and had the correspondingly bigger slice of pie to work with then I see them mkaing a powerful console because they have a much higher chance of getting a decent return on the extra investment.

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Talking about console hardware? I can see Sony and Microsoft Moving to a 100% digital platform in a generation. Maybe two. The hardware is converging, with PCs (alleged) Xbox 720 and (alleged) PS4 running X86 hardware the difference is in software. Rather than making hardware, Sony and MS can (much like Valve appear to be moving toward) have "Certified" PC's or you can build your own. Instead of (or as well as) running Windows, you'd run the PlayStation or Xbox OS. Eliminates hardware R&D and manufacturing costs, eliminates hardware risk look how the tsunami affected the Japanese hardware makers), certified devices maintain a level playing field. Upgrading the OS but keeping hardware architecture means you keep the back catalogue titles, thus maintaining platform loyalty.

 

Dean was spot on when he said "the platform is Nintendo". A "platform" is becoming less and less a piece of hardware and more a service. Given how slow Nintendo are to get online. Even now after two generations of Xbox LIVE they seem to have learned nothing about making their online service attractive and accessible. I don't think they will be around when platforms become digital.

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Going the service route doesn't eliminate hardware costs and risks, it offloads them onto other companies and the consumers. It also cedes a lot of power to the manufacturers of whatever devices run the software or, in the case of streaming services like OnLive and its progeny, to whoever controls the data infrastructure (telcos). Unless Sony or MS issue proprietary hardware, as they do now, they just become another publisher. 

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If you offload the cost and the risk it is eliminated for you. I'm not saying they break the economic equivalent of the laws of thermodynamics and that these costs just vanish into the aether. Sony and MS are already beholden to the data infrastructure for online. But it's just a pipeline. The water company has no more say in what soup I make than with what comes out of my tap than a telco would over what Sony and MS do with their bandwidth. The platform needs to be proprietary, but a platform is not (or at least is ceasing to be) a plastic box full of circuitry.

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Yeah, I'm guessing it's going to be the current gen version, at best a halfway between the two. just nice that it's coming at all - it wouldn't have come to wii, if we were talking about the turn of the last gen, even as a ps2/xbox port.

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Well if it's like Double Agent then there won't really be a way to make it halfway between the two.  The PS2/Xbox/GC/Wii version of Double Agent was an entirely different game from the PS3/360/PC version.  They had a vaguely similar premise, but that was about it.  It was definitely more that just worse graphics.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinter_cell_double_agent

Edited by TheMightyEthan
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It's nice that the Wii U will probably get a lot of the earlier launch PS4 and probably 720 multiplatform games, but thats how it tends to go. I still remember how the 360 had Xbox and PS2 games, just at higher resolutions at launch and a bit after too. That King Kong game comes to mind.

But I feel once developers use all the "horsepower" of the new systems(I dont know a lot about PCs, but amount Ram seems to be a big deal and the PS4 seems to have 3 or 4 times as much as the Wii U), Nintendo is fucked like it was fucked with the Wii. It'll be the Mario/Zelda machine again. Which isnt a bad thing because those games still made it the best selling system last generation.

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In the United States, at least, telcos seek to exercise a lot of muscle over the services using their pipelines. Way more than the water company does over the pipes, as it were. Specifically, telcos may charge customers more just for service sufficiently stable and fast to support Ninty's or Sony's or MS's online platform. There are ways they could hold such uses hostage and either charge customers more or ask for payouts from the platform providers. 

 

Besides, offloading the risk onto consumers may not make sense; folks may rather have a stable gaming platform out of the box than deal with the risks offloaded onto them by a digital platform.

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I'd be interested to see some sources for that. Are Netflix customers charged more for their subscriptions, are Netflix themselves complaining about punitive charges? If we're crystal ball gazing and second guessing, I'd imagine that the platform owners, if anyone, would be asked to pay more. Which would easily be offset by a lack of hardware manufacturing  and R&D costs.

 

You're not necessarily offloading the hardware risk to a consumer. There's nothing to stop a third party making a "Platform Certified Device", look at PlayStation Mobile for example.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Nintendo have finally lifted the time restrictions on viewing and purchasing 18 rated games on the eShop. I knew it wouldn't last for long but it's a relief all the same.

 

They've also got sales on digital versions of retail games reduced from £40/50 down to £20/30 so not just the download only games are getting sales. It's looking quite good in there if there were a few more games it would be great.

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I think it will be closer to next gen than WIi was to this gen. It's a massive leap from the Wii, but in most areas it will still lag behind the next gen MS/Sony consoles and I'm guessing as developers push those consoles and leave the PS3/360 behind, multiplats will dry up on it. As far as USPs go,  although I think Miiverse is great, and (so far) unique, it's not worth buying a console for.

 

Same as the Wii this generation, I don't think it is going to be an alternative to the new Sony/MS consoles, rather an addition. Since the N64 the only reason really to buy a NIntendo console is the Nintendo games, so I'd pretty much base any decision on how much you like them. If you don't PC game I think you'd want to get one of the alternatives else you'll miss out on all the big games everyone talks about.

 

For me, the Nintendo consoles have enough first/second party and handful of quality third party games to justify a purchase, YMMV.

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I think even calling it 7.5 is generous.  It's more like 7.2.

 

The tablet is pretty much its only selling point (beyond the obvious Nintendo exclusives), but it's a pretty damn good selling point.  Off-TV play is amazing (though the PS4 looks like it will support that via Vita for all its games too).

 

*Edit* - I agree with TFG that you should only get it if you like Nintendo's games.  It's going to be far behind PS4/720 in terms of hardware, so I imagine it will be like the Wii and not really get the multiplats.  It's a supplemental thing, it can't be the primary one.

Edited by TheMightyEthan
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