Given that of the ~22 million people who bought Wii Fit, ~20 million came back for Wii Fit Plus 2 years later, I wouldn't be so sure that the audience for these things has evaporated.
The Wii sold almost 50% more games than the PS3 over its lifespan. This stereotype that everyone bought it for Wii Sports and then chucked it in a closet isn't reflected in the sales numbers at all.
Games like Wii Sports and Wii Fit are mature IPs, in that they're aimed at actual adults who might not normally play a lot of video games. The problem the Wii U is having is that Nintendo threw a lot of money at 3rd party development for games like Wonderful 101 and Bayonetta 2 which don't really push the system's unique feature (its gamepad) and don't hit that broad audience like the Wii did.
It's a bizarre shift in strategy from a company that really should've known better.
My contention is that the market is not large enough to sustain Nintendo's hardware development costs and they will be forced to exit the market after the next handheld system flops (or possibly the system after that). People who think everything is just fine must believe Nintendo can survive on ~2 million/year sales or possibly even less. If they do survive, the systems will be limited to almost entirely Nintendo games with relatively few 3rd party titles due to the small install base.
This year to date in Japan, the 3DS has sold ~3.6 million. All other systems combined have sold ~2.4 million. That kind of market dominance guarantees there will be a 4DS, that's where the next mainline Monster Hunter and Dragon Quest entries will wind up, and those will keep the platform going for the foreseeable future based on the 3+ million games they sell per release.
Since over 100 different Wii titles sold over a million units, and the platform sold over 870 million games, customers seem to have found quite a few titles worth purchasing. Though not surprisingly, the top 10 best selling games all came from Nintendo.
The Wii's success was mostly a fluke caused by MS and Sony raising prices too much, and a couple of gimmicks that were worth some attention by some: motion controls, and wii fit.
That was no fluke; it was the logical extension of the same strategy that made the DS so successful after a rocky start. Nintendo built a system with a unique feature (motion control), made new IPs that leveraged that feature (Wii Sports, Wii Fit), targeted the nongamer crowd by offering a pleasant "Mii" aesthetic and offered classic Nintendo franchises for everyone else (Mario Kart). The end result was wildly successful.
By contrast, the Wii U is bombing because although it also has a unique feature (gamepad), its new IPs are mostly niche titles (Wonderful 101) instead of mainstream ones and the next iterations of Nintendo franchises are either also niche (Pikmon) or late (Wii Sports, Mario Kart).
The simpler approach is simply to make variable assignment a statement rather than an expression, so if (a = 1)... is no longer syntactically valid. It enforces more language verbosity while eliminating a class of potential bugs.
Even if you don't wind up doing a better job, reinventing the wheel is a good way to understand how wheels work. So the effort isn't wasted if one learns something at the end of it.
I don't have any trouble getting Python code to run without either, and run into problems due to whitespace approximately 0 times per year. Python the language only requires that code blocks be indented consistently. And since you're the one having problems with that, perhaps your development environment is defective since the files you're feeding the interpreter aren't what you think they are. If that's the case, you'll need all the help you can get.
Or you could've saved weeks of your life by running the pep8 tool on your code, which will tell you all the lines that aren't indented by a multiple of 4, or which lines have tab characters in them, or any number of other formatting problems that aren't recommended by the style guide.
When playing Wii games, the Wii U isn't emulating anything. It switches to a hardware compatibility mode and essentially becomes a Wii. And since the Wii doesn't know how to talk to the pad, the pad shuts down. This is exactly how the Wii handled Gamecube compatibility - which is one way to guarantee games will work.
Also, Wiimotes show up just fine for games that support them. There's even an option to pair them in the Wii U's home menu. It's actually rather nice to not have to buy a whole new set of controllers when moving to the next generation for once.
The Wii also never played DVDs, so it's no surprise the Wii U doesn't play Blu Rays, DVDs or any other non-game media.
Oh, and the OS GUI was recently patched to more than halve application switching times and support background downloads.
What's hard to figure out is just what Nintendo's 1st party studios have been doing all this time, since support for the Wii effectively ended a long time ago. It seems like the transition to HD has hit them with the same difficulties a lot of other Japanese studios faced. So crucial software is in short supply and titles original slated for the launch window are still months away from actual release.
But as you say, it is possible for Nintendo's 1st party output to carry a system to profitability. The Gamecube era was, after all. So it's doubtful Nintendo has much to worry about whether the Wii U ultimately turns around to mass market success or not.
If you do transfer your software from the Wii (which rarely fails except in cases of power loss or user error), it does not "brick" the Wii. The software is simply moved over and the Wii is no longer attached to those titles for redownload purposes.
And the fact is, lack of backwards compatibility makes the PS3 and 360 accounts systems meaningless. There is no way to transfer purchased titles to the next generations of those systems at all. So once the PS3 and 360 are no longer made, those games are effectively lost once the systems die - account system or no.
Microsoft switched CPUs and the new system isn't powerful enough to emulate the old in software, so it was pretty much certain the new X-Box would drop all compatibility. The problem is that this cuts off any migration path for 360 owners. So since they'll have to buy an all new library from scratch anyway, there's no reason not to jump ship to the PS4, Wii U or whatever. It's an understandable move, but one that's liable to hurt in the short term at least.
Backwards compatibility did help the PS2, along with Nintendo's long line of portables. But the PS3 architecture is unsustainable, so there was never any chance those games would be supported by the PS4. The best one can hope for is that they'll be recompiled for the new architecture and put up on Sony's download shop someday in the future.
Yeah an archive that may never be playable. The point of archiving is preservation, but a lot of good that FLAC archive would do someone who found it in 1000 years while sifting through the remnants of Earth - they will have a lot easier time finding a device that still exists that plays MP3 than they would FLAC or what have you.
FLAC is about an order of magnitude simpler than MP3. I once implemented a decoder in about an hour over lunch just because I could. And because many lossless codecs feature error detection, they're much more likely to survive as a long-term archive than something like MP3 which doesn't even have a container or any reliable way to verify that the file's contents are correct.
And you never have to re-rip physical discs. 128kb/s CBR MP3 used to be the standard. Then 192 VBR. Then AAC. And so on and so forth. So by keeping a lossless archive, one will always be able to transcode to the latest-and-greatest lossy codec without a lot of hassle.
I've integrated a silly little timer into my editor which alternates between long work periods and short break periods. I'll check emails and the interwebs on the breaks and close/minimize browsers to focus on task during the work times. At first I look forward to those little break times, but I get into a nice zone by the end of the day.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that of the ~22 million people who bought Wii Fit, ~20 million came back for Wii Fit Plus 2 years later, I wouldn't be so sure that the audience for these things has evaporated.
The Wii sold almost 50% more games than the PS3 over its lifespan. This stereotype that everyone bought it for Wii Sports and then chucked it in a closet isn't reflected in the sales numbers at all.
Games like Wii Sports and Wii Fit are mature IPs, in that they're aimed at actual adults who might not normally play a lot of video games. The problem the Wii U is having is that Nintendo threw a lot of money at 3rd party development for games like Wonderful 101 and Bayonetta 2 which don't really push the system's unique feature (its gamepad) and don't hit that broad audience like the Wii did.
It's a bizarre shift in strategy from a company that really should've known better.
This year to date in Japan, the 3DS has sold ~3.6 million. All other systems combined have sold ~2.4 million. That kind of market dominance guarantees there will be a 4DS, that's where the next mainline Monster Hunter and Dragon Quest entries will wind up, and those will keep the platform going for the foreseeable future based on the 3+ million games they sell per release.
Since over 100 different Wii titles sold over a million units, and the platform sold over 870 million games, customers seem to have found quite a few titles worth purchasing. Though not surprisingly, the top 10 best selling games all came from Nintendo.
That was no fluke; it was the logical extension of the same strategy that made the DS so successful after a rocky start. Nintendo built a system with a unique feature (motion control), made new IPs that leveraged that feature (Wii Sports, Wii Fit), targeted the nongamer crowd by offering a pleasant "Mii" aesthetic and offered classic Nintendo franchises for everyone else (Mario Kart). The end result was wildly successful.
By contrast, the Wii U is bombing because although it also has a unique feature (gamepad), its new IPs are mostly niche titles (Wonderful 101) instead of mainstream ones and the next iterations of Nintendo franchises are either also niche (Pikmon) or late (Wii Sports, Mario Kart).
The simpler approach is simply to make variable assignment a statement rather than an expression, so if (a = 1) ... is no longer syntactically valid. It enforces more language verbosity while eliminating a class of potential bugs.
isn't what anybody wants, whereas mixing assignment and conditionals may make sense in other contexts, like:
The "we'd like your thoughts" link is a standard mailto: URL. If it's using Outlook, that's because your browser is configured to use it.
Even if you don't wind up doing a better job, reinventing the wheel is a good way to understand how wheels work. So the effort isn't wasted if one learns something at the end of it.
I don't have any trouble getting Python code to run without either, and run into problems due to whitespace approximately 0 times per year. Python the language only requires that code blocks be indented consistently. And since you're the one having problems with that, perhaps your development environment is defective since the files you're feeding the interpreter aren't what you think they are. If that's the case, you'll need all the help you can get.
Or you could've saved weeks of your life by running the pep8 tool on your code, which will tell you all the lines that aren't indented by a multiple of 4, or which lines have tab characters in them, or any number of other formatting problems that aren't recommended by the style guide.
It's not about switching to Intel CPUs, it's about switching to Intel for fabbing Apple ARM CPUs.
But in general, swapping out a whole new CPU would mean a lot of application migration which is best avoided.
When playing Wii games, the Wii U isn't emulating anything. It switches to a hardware compatibility mode and essentially becomes a Wii. And since the Wii doesn't know how to talk to the pad, the pad shuts down. This is exactly how the Wii handled Gamecube compatibility - which is one way to guarantee games will work.
Also, Wiimotes show up just fine for games that support them. There's even an option to pair them in the Wii U's home menu. It's actually rather nice to not have to buy a whole new set of controllers when moving to the next generation for once.
The Wii also never played DVDs, so it's no surprise the Wii U doesn't play Blu Rays, DVDs or any other non-game media.
Oh, and the OS GUI was recently patched to more than halve application switching times and support background downloads.
What's hard to figure out is just what Nintendo's 1st party studios have been doing all this time, since support for the Wii effectively ended a long time ago. It seems like the transition to HD has hit them with the same difficulties a lot of other Japanese studios faced. So crucial software is in short supply and titles original slated for the launch window are still months away from actual release.
But as you say, it is possible for Nintendo's 1st party output to carry a system to profitability. The Gamecube era was, after all. So it's doubtful Nintendo has much to worry about whether the Wii U ultimately turns around to mass market success or not.
If you do transfer your software from the Wii (which rarely fails except in cases of power loss or user error), it does not "brick" the Wii. The software is simply moved over and the Wii is no longer attached to those titles for redownload purposes.
And the fact is, lack of backwards compatibility makes the PS3 and 360 accounts systems meaningless. There is no way to transfer purchased titles to the next generations of those systems at all. So once the PS3 and 360 are no longer made, those games are effectively lost once the systems die - account system or no.
Microsoft switched CPUs and the new system isn't powerful enough to emulate the old in software, so it was pretty much certain the new X-Box would drop all compatibility. The problem is that this cuts off any migration path for 360 owners. So since they'll have to buy an all new library from scratch anyway, there's no reason not to jump ship to the PS4, Wii U or whatever. It's an understandable move, but one that's liable to hurt in the short term at least.
Then why did they switch to 100% HFCS 6 months prior to introducing New Coke?
Wayland promises to eliminate tearing, lag, redrawing or flicker, which would be a welcome change.
Backwards compatibility did help the PS2, along with Nintendo's long line of portables. But the PS3 architecture is unsustainable, so there was never any chance those games would be supported by the PS4. The best one can hope for is that they'll be recompiled for the new architecture and put up on Sony's download shop someday in the future.
FLAC is about an order of magnitude simpler than MP3. I once implemented a decoder in about an hour over lunch just because I could. And because many lossless codecs feature error detection, they're much more likely to survive as a long-term archive than something like MP3 which doesn't even have a container or any reliable way to verify that the file's contents are correct.
And you never have to re-rip physical discs. 128kb/s CBR MP3 used to be the standard. Then 192 VBR. Then AAC. And so on and so forth. So by keeping a lossless archive, one will always be able to transcode to the latest-and-greatest lossy codec without a lot of hassle.
I've integrated a silly little timer into my editor which alternates between long work periods and short break periods. I'll check emails and the interwebs on the breaks and close/minimize browsers to focus on task during the work times. At first I look forward to those little break times, but I get into a nice zone by the end of the day.
The language is named after Monty Python's Flying Circus, but the trademark only applies to software.
The Python trademark was registered some time ago in the US but it's unclear why the Python Software Foundation didn't do the same in the EU.