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Revolution Least Expensive Next-Gen Console
exdeath writes "Today, one of Nintendo's most public faces said the Revolution
will stand out from its competition for a reason besides its innovative controller: price.
Speaking to CNN/Money correspondent Chris Morris Reggie Fils-Aime, executive vice president of sales and marketing,
predicted that the Revolution would be cheaper than both the Xbox 360
and the PlayStation 3. How low will Nintendo go? It's hard to tell.
Microsoft is selling two Xbox 360 SKUs--the no-frills $299 core Xbox
and the $399 standard model with hard drive and wireless remote. In his interview with Morris, Fils-Aime also reiterated that the
Revolution will not support high-definition televisions. 'What we'll
offer in terms of gameplay and approachability will more than make up
for the lack of HD,' he said. Both Microsoft and Sony are making much
of the 360 and PS3's HD capabilities. Fils-Aime also implied that the DS will see redesigns, just as the Game Boy Advance has."
As important as it is to lowball the competition when you're coming in from a niche angle like Nintendo is with the Revolution, it certainly isn't everything. GameCube was $100 cheaper, and all it really did was convince all of the consumers that it wasn't as technically able or as good an investment as PS2 or Xbox.
While the cheaper price will help, I think the only way it'll become useful in the marketplace is if Nintendo successfully distinguishes it and its remote-like controller from the competition. If they can pull off a positive impression from the public, mix in some media hype, and simultaneously be able to get into more households via the accessible price, they'll probably be in business. Not looking like a purple lunch box will probably also help them carve out their own new little market to get out of the pissing contest Microsoft and Sony are throwing all their money at in preparation of.
Of course, what's really to be seen is how well HDTV is adopted by people and how many gamers will be alright with the fact that few if any Revolution games will output any higher than 480p. They might look beautiful on standard TVs, but once the console has been out a couple years and HDTV adoption rates are more pervasive, it'll probably bring the console to a screeching halt similar to what the GameCube is experiencing.
-Juice
It all depends on what you want. Do you want the same old games we've been getting for years now, updated with flashy graphics? Or do you want a new gameplay experience with an innovative remote allowing for a unique experience?
If the control is used well, and not used as a gimmick, then I can see the Revolution being a hell of a lot better then PS3 and Xbox 360. But it has to be used to good effect. Of course, those that will lap up whatever "XXX 200X" gamecompanies spew out, will of course like their flashy graphics, because for them that's one of the few ways a game can improve in.
I'm just hoping the Revolution gets a good healthy library from a large range of developers, and isn't inundated with gimmicky games and Mario Bros XX.
I suspect that Nintendo's argument is that they want to appeal not just to the predominantly teenage male "hardcore" market.
Rather than entering the hardware arms race of Microsoft and Nintendo to see who can create the most realistic, or at least visually impressive game experience, Nintendo seem to want a more modest aesthetic and rely more on interesting game designs. Whether or not that will work, who knows - but I do at least applaud their attempt at diversifying the game market.
Not everyone wants to play Need for Bling Underground Xtreme 2007, you know.
Those numbers are pretty ugly when you think about it. Two out of 12 people give a damn enough to buy a brand new TV and one of those two bothered to buy the component cable. By the way, the one who bought the HD cable also sold his HDTV because he just doesn't watch TV enough to justify a gigantic TV in his condo.
I don't think that HDTV/console gaming is at a big enough saturation to compel Nintendo to include HDTV support. They make money hand over fist so I'm sure they believe this is the best way to market the machine but I can only guess that adding HDTV support and just selling the cable seperately would only tack on an extra $10-15 bucks.
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Ars Technica had a good piece related to this. Very briefly, they point out that most titles are written to be cross-platform, thus erasing a lot of the relative hardware benefits of each platform.
r ossplatform.ars
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/c
I think Nintendo is on to a winner; we'll see if the execution is as good as their ideas.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Nintendo has stated that on regular TVs, Revolution will be nearly indistinguishable from HD. Now, I don't know about you, but I certainly don't have an HD set and probably won't for several years - poor soon-to-be graduate student and all.
What the Revolution will be about is a new way of playing games, not the glowiest explosions. The PS3 and Xbox 360 are more or less equivalent in the games they'll let you play. The Revolution will be able to handle those games (albeit not in HD) but also open up lots of new possibilities for new games too while adding new control options to the traditional genres (RTS, FPS especially). As a gamer since I was a little tadpole, I don't see how people could not be at least a little excited about what Nintendo's doing.
Nintendo won't cut production values, because they've been about high production values and lower cost than the competitors for a while now.
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[Big Brick Wall]
with nintendo yes... if you grab a gamecube, and 2 or 3 games youre set. super monkey ball, mario kart, even mario all have hundreds of hours of gameplay in them, not tens like most games released predominantly for other consoles. so if the arguement is revolution + 3 games against xbox 360 + 5 games, it becomes even more of a factor. and as to the kids arguement, you need to keep them satisfied over the long run, you dont but a console and several games at one, you buy ONE game, then more later, or buy several but wait before giving them out individually. several games at once mean the kids will play only one, and forget the rest...
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
Meryl Lynch reported that the Xbox 360 could be as low as $250 this spring and MS would still make a profit. The revolution won't be out that soon, and when it does come out, chances are MS will only be charging a couple hundred dollars at the most. So unless the revolution starts at $100 at release, it will most likely be the same or more then the Xbox 360.
n dex.php
http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/11/03/console/i
Not to knock Nintendo here, but I'll probably never own one. The reason is simple. The problem is not the controller (I have to admit, it's a neat idea, although I'm skeptical about how comfortable it is), or the hardware, or even the fact that it's Nintendo. It's Nintendo's target audience. The games designed by Nintendo are primarily for kids. We can expect to see more of the cute loveable nintendo icons in many of their titles reincarnated a few thousand times more. These aren't the titles I want out of a console, and this will probably be the only reason I'll get an xbox 360 and skip the revolution all together. To me, price won't be the determining factor. The titles availabale will be.
The same thing happened initially when I got a portable. First I got a DS, however after 6 months of ownership I realized that Nintendo wasn't going to deliver on any of the game types I wanted to see. I sold my DS and got a PSP and haven't looked back since. The PSP simply has more titles which will appeal to the 30+ age group. Especially those who are tired of mario and friends.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Sony developed an entirely new CPU architecture for the PS3.
Microsoft went well beyond the current state of the art for desktops: three custom PowerPC cores on one die, running at 3+ GHz.
And honestly, that's where much of the expense is coming from. It's not like SEGA (with the Genesis) or Nintendo (with the SNES or GC or GBA) or even Sony in the days of the PS1 decided to go with custom processors, let alone processors that shoot for the ultra-high end. Consoles have always been about custom hardware for some things, lowish-end commodity parts for everything else.
Have you ever really compared the difference between a WMVHD file at 1080p with a DVD movie at 480p?
5 &p=5
For those that haven't what you will notice is that the 1080p image is crisper but nothing to really get too excited about; 480p to 1080i or 720p is barely noticable on most displays. Now I know what you're thinking, a real-time generated 3D image produces artifacts that make it no where near the quality of a DVD image; after all at 1600x1200 a PC game still has jaggies without AA, and the textures are blurry without AF. What you don't realize is that by increasing the resolution they may (in fact) be lowering the image quality and performing at a far worse level. The reason is simple, as shading hardware becomes more powerful, and shaders become more complex, the greater the performance hit will be from increasing the resolution by even a small ammount. If you look at most benchmarking of new games you will notice that (almost) all games have dramatically better performance at 1024x768 with 8xAA and 8xAF than they do at 1600x1200 with no image processing; at 480p I suspect that (on equal hardware) you could have 16xAA and 16xAF and have a much higher framerate than you could at 1080i or 720p.
Just look at FEAR:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=257
At 1280x1024 (a good estimate of HD resolutions) you're getting between 20-40 FPS on most new hardware [in this test]; using the same cards at 640x480 (a good estimate of 480p) you're getting between 50-100 fps. I'm willing to bet money that the main reason the XBox 360 looks like "the XBox at high resolutions" is that it is highly difficult for a developer to produce a game, use high quality shaders / textures and models and maintain a decent framerate.
> And of all three consoles, it was still in last place, beat by Microsoft's very first console ever...
the difference being that the GC made a profit for Nintendo, whereas MS made a loss ("investment") of 4 billion dollars and still doesn't expect to see an overall profit for years to come.
I think HDTV gameplaying may happen at a slower rate than HDTV adoption. In our house the game system (a gamecube) is relegated to the den on a second TV. When we get a big HDTV its going in the family room and I'm not going to let the kids usurp this TV all day to play games. While this comment clearly puts me in the "video games are for kids" camp, I still think this is the predominant demographic. There's a market for adult game playing and it's growing and I'm sure there is money to be made there, but I still think alot of game systems get relegated to secondary TVs in other rooms. In other words this market is maturing and fragmenting into different niches.
I'm buying a revolution simply because Mario and Zelda are two of the best series I've ever played... I would pay $200 just for the new zelda coming out on the gamecube.
most people are saying the reason it's not hd capable is because they are not even using a tv with this thing. perhaps a visor ala "On" or a steroscopic projection which many are also saying. i do believe they certainly have a trick up there sleave, why else would we not have seen ANY screen shots of any games that will be releasing in under 7 months. it just doesn't make sense. i'll tell you y, it's cuz the don't microsoft or sony to copy them and make a similar peripheral. i'm telling ya that the controller was and is not the BIG secret.
Really, there are so many ignorant people out there. I'm glad you got marked troll, because thats exactly what you are doing. Nintendo has always said they make their games for everyone. Mature people dont need edgy violence and crap to make fun games. They just make good gameplay. If good gameplay isnt enough for you, then you should probably not be buying games to begin with.
And there is a definite difference between 720 and 1080 as well. I noticed when I first started watching NFL in HD. One of the broadcasters would broadcast in 720 (Fox, I think) and another (CBS?) would broadcast in 1080. The 1080 definitely looked TONS better.
I think it is because if you have a high frame rate normally, then we the scenes get more complicated, you are more likely to run at an acceptable frame rate still. If you are just getting by with the normal scenery, frame rate wise, the complicated scenery will completely bog things down, and make it choppy
Merrill Lynch aren't journalists, they aren't a video game company. They aren't Microsoft. They aren't Sony. They aren't accountable to anyone. They're analysts. They guess. If they're wrong, there are no consequences to them.
Merrill Lynch also seems to make awfully consistent guesses about the next generation, specifically: Whatever is good for Microsoft. The persistent claims in the last several months that the Playstation 3 will cost exorbant amounts of money also, if you follow sources, inevitably stem from guesses by Merrill Lynch. Contrast this with Merrill Lynch's guesses in 1999, which predicted the ps2 would sell for well more than it ever did.
Other recent winning predictions by analysts about the video game industry have been that the PSP would be a smash success and knock the Nintendo DS and Game Boy outside of the market (it's outsold neither); that Nintendo would die every year for the last five; that Apple would die every year for the five before that; that Nintendo DS online would launch with free VOIP; and that the PS3 will launch in 2007.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Am I the only one confused by the fact that the Gamecube supported HD, but the "next-gen" console does not? That seems like a strange move for Nintendo, IMO.
It's definitely too early to say which gives you the most bang for your buck, since we don't know what "bang" the Revolution will give you, nor how much "buck" the PS3 will cost.
Well, look. I really hope this doesn't sound flamebaity, but look at the XBox 360 launch.
One racing game. (PGR3)
One generic first person shoot-em-up by a Nintendo second party past their prime-- which was developed for XBox, then was ported this year. (PDZ)
One generic fantasy game by a Nintendo second party past their prime-- which was developed for XBox, then was ported this year. (Kameo)
and... everything else is either multiplatform (Gun, Madden), a PC game (Condemned), delayed (DOA4), or all of these (Oblivion).
I think I can make at least some assumptions about systems doing better, because I don't see how Nintendo and Sony could possibly do any worse.
Nintendo will do just fine with the Revolution. One of the great mysteries to me is how, with very similar worldwide sales numbers, the Xbox is considered such a success, while the GC is considered a failure.
Nice guy answer: because Nintendo has been in the business for 2 decades, and Microsoft was a n00b.
More realistic answer: Most young'uns have short memories, but when the Xbox was first announced, it was pretty much the laughing stock of the gaming industry. Microsoft? an x86 console? WTF? When it was released it was even more of a joke. Until Halo came around, hardly anyone wanted what was basically the Saturn for a new generation. I won't bring up the absolutely STUPIDLY LARGE controller more than once, I promise.
Seriously, when the Xbox actually started to sell, I remember people falling out of their chairs. It's a serious lame-duck console on most fronts, and without Halo, would probably have lost Microsoft twice the $4 billion it already did. Live was about the only unique feature on it; otherwise, it was just another PS2 from all appearances. I think there was a bit of an anti-Sony backlash in the past couple of years as well, and the Gamecube just never cut it with the 14-21 year old market. They only want "M" games.
But yeah. Compaing the GC and the Xbox, it's pretty obvious the GC beat the pants off of MS. It made at miniumum $4 billion more than the Xbox. It was a system that only "kids" played, according to damn near every media talking head. Nintendo was going the way of Sega after their drubbing by Sony in round 1. They still pulled out 2nd in the "race".
Yet, somehow the Xbox did very well. Yup, because no one seriously thought it would go anywhere until after Halo.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.