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More Hints at Nintendo's Revolution
The Nintendo press conference touched on aspects of the Nintendo Revolution, but offered no details on what "the" revolution is. No word on the controllers or when the console will be released. One new tantilizing aspect of the console was announced, though: "The console also will have downloadable access to
20 years of fan-favorite titles originally released for
Nintendo® 64, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System® (SNES) and
even the Nintendo Entertainment System® (NES)." No word on pricing, of course, but exciting nonetheless.
Bye bye, emu sites.
Have they mentioned the idea of letting 3rd-party companies offer current games for download?
True, most current games would be too large, but it would be quite awesome if you could buy simple, independently developed (but N-approved) games via the same method that the back catalog games will be downloaded...
It would be really interesting if smaller companies could have a direct distribution route for "smaller" (but still innovative gameplay-wise) games.
What with Microsoft finally coming through on the Xbox backwards compatibility, and now this, it's pretty obvious that all three of the console makers finally get it.
The size of a game library can be just as important as the number of quality games. Consumers like choice. Just like with music, so it is with videogames. This is something that Nintendo failed to address with the Nintendo64 and the Gamecube. It's almost painful to see how well they get it when it comes to the portable market (GameBoy and family), but not their home consoles.
I, for one, am hoping they do the right thing, and make the library available for free. While they'll miss out on some revenues of old games, they'll have a guaranteed sell for the Revolution (and Nintendo typically sells it's hardware at break-even or profit), and a footstep into future sales. Combine this with sales of Gamecube games that will also work in the Revolution, and Nintendo could see itself launched into the forefront of the three console makers.
Interestingly enough, it's mostly thanks to companies like Netflix and Amazon that these companies are beginning to understand. They've made such a profitable market out of niche sales, that big business is being forced to recognize the power that is the little guy, instead of just pandering to hit sales. In the business world, they're calling this "The Long Tail", and it's turning out to be huge money. (So much so, that business executives everywhere are sitting up and taking notice.) There are articles in The Economist and Wired. The traditional thinking has been that 80% of revenues typically comes from 20% of the titles, and it's been true for a long time. However, in the internet world, where you're not limited by shelf space, and you can aggregate diverse markets, the other 80% of titles (niche titles) can bring in as much money as the most popular 20%.
Nintendo has always excelled at putting out hits (Zelda, Mario, Metroid, Pokemon, etc.), which is why I think they've typically ignored this facet of business, but I think that even they may be starting to take notice. Here's hoping so :-)
The XBox 360 gets unveiled; it hits the slashdot front page. The Sony PS3 gets unveiled; it hits the slashdot front page. The Nintendo Revolution gets unveiled; it goes to the games.slashdot section page.
Hmm.
Anyhow, Nintendo pretty much let down anyone who was hoping for real information today. I can shrug this off though. What matters to me though is what they do to developers.
Nintendo made quiet public statements a month or so ago that there would be more shown of the Revolution behind closed doors than there were in their E3 conference; today, they brought a Revolution prototype on stage (and apparently a functional one, since they said it wasn't as small as the final version would be) and said that they'd be showing it off in meetings later that week. I assume this means they're going to be revealing the information to developers this week that they didn't to consumers today.
And, well, they'd better. Work on PS3 games is clearly already starting or seriously underway. Nintendo can continue to cocktease consumers for another six months without it being a serious problem for them, but if they don't sell third party developers on this quickly they're going to outright miss the chance to get third parties signed on at all.
The thing that really concerns me is, Nintendo seems to be convinced they have solutions for low-budget high-concept dev houses; well, that won't really help much if nobody but the five or six massive developers Nintendo talks to behind closed doors this week are considered NDA-trustworthy enough to get dev kits, and by the time the low-budget high-concept game designers actually find out what the Revolution is they're already locked into making PS3 games.
Well, at least the new DS lineup is absolutely fantastic.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I'm far from the most astute, but wouldn't downloadable content like NES, SNES, or N64 games require some sort of storage?
Everything I've read so far about the Rev mentions nothing about a HDD but says that it will have 512MB of flash memory. I guess this could be used for savegames, but there's no way this could be used for the downloaded games.
I know Ninty's reluctant to take the plunge, but would it kill them to put a 5 or 10GB HDD in the thing? Or am I completely misunderstanding how this is giong to work?
My guess is the latter, but who knows.
There's another thing to take into consideration.
Remember before this generation came out. Sony and microsoft were blatantly advertising how many polygons their consoles could put out. Sony said what, like 70 million+ or somewhere in there?
Nintendo's response was that we can do 12 million, in a real gameplay situation.
Ironically, for many games, those 12 million sure do look better then those theoretical 70 million.
Nintendo also severely underestimated the usuable distance for the Wavebird if you'll recall.
Something tells me not to trust this fully. MS may say 15 times more powerful, Sony may say 35 times more powerful, but until we get some developers saying something (or some real specs), that 3 times more powerful might not be as low as it seems...
One thing I've noticed about Nintendo is that they tend to be extremely conservative in their promises of quality. They do NOT want to say that a feature will be in, then not have it in, and they do NOT want people to think their stuff is better than it actually is. (They want people to FEEL like its better, sure.)
On the other hand, Sony (and Microsoft, to a lesser degree) do the exact opposite. They trump up their numbers as much as they possibly can without outright lying -- except for when they outright lie.
I think it's safe to say that the PS3 will have more power than its competitors, surely. There's no doubt of that. But I agree with you in that it's too early to say how big the difference will be.
Bah, don't worry. Nintendo knows what they're doing, you need look no further than the gamecube. Far more powerful than the PS2 for all practical purposes on theoretically weaker hardware. A really well done GCN game(the new zelda, RE4) looks as good(or better in some ways) as a really well done XBox game, and the hardware/development hump difference is huge. Plus they managed to all but remove load times w/o an HDD. The N64 was more powerful than the PS1(comparable to the rendering power of an SGI workstation of the time), just limited by storage capacity. The SNES was as strong as the genesis in it's own ways. The NES however, was weak compared to the SMS, but now we're 20 years back.
Going by specs is always a bad idea. Remember all the PS2 hype? Yea. Just ignore it and wait to see actual moving footage of comparitive gen games before you go off and pan one as weak and praise another as strong.
Besides, according to many rumors, it's a 2.5GHz 4 core PPC(vs. the Xboxes 3GHz 3 core PPC) with comparitive graphics processors and RAM to the XBox 360. Certainly no slouch.
If anything I'd call the PS3 the weakest of the 3. It fits the Sony pattern, and Sony is the company with the LEAST software development experience. Remember that both Nintendo AND MS have been doing development for 3 decades. Sony's been doing it for just over 1.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
Just look at the features of the PS3, 3 x Gigabit ports, WiFi, BlueTooth, CF, not to mention the RAM and GPU. There's no way it will be affordable.