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Nintendo's Iwata Says Old Console Cycle Dead
1up is reporting on comments from Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata, who has offered up the opinion that the four-year console cycle is a thing of the past. Instead, he says, companies should look to iterate on their hardware when an opportunity presents itself. "Launches should depend on when it can signify a major shift in entertainment, or when they have done everything possible with the current hardware. He also says that scheduling the successor to current hardware on a 4-year life cycle without paying attention to changes in the market 'appears to be too inflexible an approach to us.' This isn't to say that the company doesn't have eyes on the future. 'We need to forecast what the future will be like with the expected evolution of new technologies which are available at any given time, and try to identify the so-called 'sweet spot' of technology over the next few years,' he said."
I believe this has been proven already.
Nintendo has had the habit of short console-lives if you start with the NES (Yes, consoles do predate it, but this is a simplified view.) It was released in 1983, overtaken by the Super Nintendo in 1990 (Lasting 7 years). Next was the N64 in 1996 (making the Super Nintendo last 6 years), next was the Gamecube in 2001 (N64 life span: 5 years). And finally the Wii in 2006 (Gcube life: 5 years).
However if you look at Sony, the original playstation was released in 1994, not overtaken by the PS2 untill 2000 (6 year life). And then by the PS3 in 2007 (7 year life).
Arguably, Sony has/had the majority market with the Playstation 2, I believe part of its popularity was the fact that it became so cheap, with no changes, that anybody could have one, and play games together. Something PC gaming lacks if you do not keep your pc up to date.
And you must also take into consideration, games can only get as realistic as real life. It's one thing to go from Super Mario Brothers on the NES to Crysis, but Crysis to real life won't be that big of a jump. And when graphics/physics/AI get as good as real life, there is no major drive for a new console for "next-gen" games, they won't be able to get any better (gameplay aside for this arguement). It is also taking us longer to increase realism, thus the life of consoles will be extended (if you can understand my ramblings).
No offense, but your argument against this gen is crap.
PS3 was too expensive, and doesn't have a lot of games
PS2's launch library was crap initially too. The PS3's price is coming down.
Xbox360 dies on you
So did the PSX's laser, for those of us who remember. Later, the hardware got better.
I'm not the type that would like the Wiimote controller [my emphasis]
As in a human being?;) At least try it before you decide you don't like it. I didn't think I would like sashimi either, but it is yummy.
Now, if you'd wanted to MS's pay-for-multiplayer system or the lack of any coherent system on Wii/PS3, that's one thing. But you dislike two systems based on incidental qualities, won't even try the 3rd, and throw up your hands and say that's it?
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
DRAM Makers Suffer Due to Lackluster Vista Adoption, The Dying PC Market, and this story?
People arent adopting as fast as tech is pumping out. People dont like to change for change sake. As the popular saying goes, if it ain't broke, why fix it?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Firstly he's talking about the DS and more generally he's saying there's no point in rushing to the next generation until you've run out of ideas on the current generation. He's not talking about "power", rather capabilities, thereby suggesting that we should see new devices when they have something fundamentally new to offer, not just more power.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Iwata is admitting that the Wii isn't as powerful as it should be
There is no "admitting". He is just repeating what he has said all along: that it makes no sense to deck out a game console with HD and all kinds of gadgets when the end result costs $600. That, and that Nintendo cannot (and actually has no intention to) subsidize such a system in the way that Microsoft (and Sony to a smaller extent) can and is willing to do.
That is, Nintendo will release a next-generation system when the technological advances allow a significant jump in gameplay improvement at a ca. $249 price point. Makes sense to me.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Game devs will have to target the lowest hardware they can get away with using
In other words, either the additional capability goes to waste, or the market is fragmented around those with the upgraded version and not. This is quite possibly the worst idea that Nintendo could possibly have. There is a reason that nobody does 'SegaCD' crap anymore.
After owning an HD set, it's very very difficult to watch SD anything on it. When I first heard my wife say, "why isn't this in HD," I knew the "what's the big deal about HD" crowd is going to die off pretty quickly. "Fun" being such an subjective word, can be defined in many ways. Who says better visuals and sound are not part of this equation? Yes, gameplay counts as a huge part of the overall equation, but to snuff visuals and sound as being unimportant is simply turning a blind eye.
You seem to have missed my major point: it isn't hard to make a game engine run at different resolutions. It doesn't make memory requirements exorbitant. Hell, even DOOM can render to a dozen different screen sizes. With a console like the Wii using OpenGL, it is pretty much trivial for the game developers to enable higher resolutions when running on the more powerful device. It certainly doesn't approach double the effort. After all, it isn't like the resolution is hard-coded with assembly language. Even N64 games were written in C. And practically every 3d engine already includes a level-of-detail scaling system to use for rendering distant objects. It's been well established that 3d graphics is one of the most trivially scalable computing tasks, and you have yet to offer any reason why that can't apply to consoles.
And while is may not be such a good idea for Nintendo right now, the situation will probably be very different two years from now. Certainly when the HD-DVD/Blu-ray thing gets settled, Nintendo will have incentive to release a compatible, HD-capable Wii. But even now, Nintendo is preparing to release a new revision of the Wii that supports DVD playback. Would anybody be surprised if it included a faster GPU with better decoding features? Or if they added 802.11n support next year?
The days are long gone where games magically break if the clock speed of the CPU is too fast or too slow. Nobody in their right mind complains that their quad-core gaming rig is wasted on Half-life 2 just because the engine also runs on the original Xbox.