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Nintendo's Mysterious 'NX' Gaming Platform To Be Launched In March 2017 (pcworld.com)
Nintendo has announced that its next gaming platform -- codenamed NX -- will launch worldwide in March 2017. "For our dedicated video game platform, Nintendo is currently developing a gaming platform codenamed 'NX' with a brand-new concept," the gaming console company said while announcing its annual results. PCWorld reports:Nintendo is placing big bets on NX. The company will continue to offer games for smartphone devices, a strategy it has started executing on, but its core business focus will be on what it describes as its "software-led hardware-software integrated business." [...] For the fiscal year ended March 31, the company sold 6.8 million units of the portable Nintendo 3DS hardware and over 48.5 million units of 3DS software. Global sales of the Wii U hardware and software were 3.26 million and 27.4 million units respectively.
XBox360 and PS3 were far superior to the Wii in technology, but the Wii destroyed the competition in sales. Your point is mute.
For the current generation of consoles, the PS4 has sold over 35 million consoles, the Xbox One is over 19 million, and the Wii U is at 12.8 million. The Wii did quite well, but the Wii U has lagged pretty far behind its competitors.
Superior in terms of raw horsepower sure, but that's not the market that Nintendo is trying to go for.
Nintendo caters to same-console multiplayer and exploration-game and platformer players, not competitive FPS and sports-game players. Their design goals are easy-to-pick-up, intuitive, and fun, not focused solely on dazzling the eyes with the extreme number of polygons. They explore wacky and different game mechanics like the motion-controller Wii remotes and the asymetric-gameplay Wii U tablet. Go into any nursing home. Odds are you'll find a Wii but won't find an Xbox or PS.
It would be stupid for Nintendo to exit the market, there's no one else that is even trying to cater to their player base. You may not be part of their target market, and that's completely okay. Other people are.
For the current generation of consoles, the PS4 has sold over 35 million consoles, the Xbox One is over 19 million, and the Wii U is at 12.8 million.
And PC is at 200 million.
As for handhelds, how far is PlayStation Vita behind Nintendo 3DS again?
Certainly possible, but further down the rabbit hole in which they currently languish.
The WiiU primarily did 2 new things: Introduced new interface hardware, and let that hardware divide the experience. Local multiplayer suffered the worst, and adding a VR headset will only exacerbate the problem.
Now, I personally don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with asymmetric multiplayer. Just the opposite, actually. It opens up a lot of potential for new and interesting games, which their Nintendoland tech demo did a good job of illustrating... but it never took off from there.
Nintendo failed to create any games that really took advantage of the hardware, instead shoehorning it into games for no adequate reason, which only makes the game worse (lookin at you, star fox). And they failed to court any 3rd party vendors to create such games.
Despite the potential for asymmetric gameplay, the system failed. I don't see how a double-down on the asymmetry will make things better next time.
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