Nintendo Hardware is underpowered! 8 more days until Nintendo spills the beans

@xboxiphoneps3: The 3DS was successful despite stiff competition from smartphones. There's still a market for handhelds.

@iandizion713: refer to Mbird's post.

@ronvalencia: Shield TV isnt portable, so your not making sense. And docked Switch will be more powerful, so again i dont see your point.

16 days before Sheep Apocalypse.

@iandizion713: Refer to Mbird's post for Tegra X1 being the most powerful mobile solution claim when Switch's mobile mode is less than 1/3 of Shield TV. Surface 4 Pro beats non-mobile Shit TV.

@ronvalencia: Surface Pro 4 is too expensive.

The fact that the Switch is being viewed as a 3DS upgrade is more proof that this system is weak. The form factor alone should give people the largest hint.

16 days left for people to realize Nintendo hasn't changed and will never change. Blue Ocean strategy forever.

@emgesp: or maybe the opposite. No one really knows at this point, but would that matter if t has Pokémon for next holiday season, a launch Mario game and Zelda during the summer?

@emgesp: what's wrong with the blue ocean? It's what drives the industry forward. Plus the Wii U was no blue ocean device.

Surface 4 sucks for gaming bro. With only 4g ram and having to share a bunch with the OS, plus its poor battery life and price. It doesnt even have a dedicated graphics card. Apple has the superior solution. And again, Shield TV isnt mobile, so i dont see your point. Mbird is talking phone wise in their post.

Nintendo could take a diarrhea dump on my face, and as long as it came with a new Zelda game and I can play the next iteration of Mario Bros, Smash Bros, Kirby, Metroid, Mario Kart, Animal Crossing, Mario Party, DK, Paper Mario, & Pokemon, on it...I'm all in Day 1.

(P.S. a Kid Icarus, Punch-Out, F-Zero and some 3rd party titles would be cool too.)

Yes it was, just wasn't successful. Wii U tried to succeed in a very similar way as the original Wii, but the dual screen concept didn't catch on in a home console environment. DS already succeeded with that gimmick years earlier.

Blue Ocean is simply to focus on creating something unique instead of following an evolutionary approach to console design like the PS4/XB1.

No it isn't, market rejected the device. It's not blue ocean if it didn't attracted the masses

Blue Ocean doesn't guarantee success nimrod, its simply a strategy. A company still has to execute it properly for it to work.

With your logic you must think the PS4 is a Blue Ocean device given it has attracted the masses.

The Shield TV has a Tegra X1, the same chip being used for the Switch, so it is being used as a point of comparison to determine the Switches capabilities. However, since it doesn't have to be mobile, it uses the chip as best as it can be used and even while docked, the Switch will be slower (since it won't be running at the rated 1 GHz for the chip).

I had forgotten that the announcement was so soon

I expected better of you for discussion, than start name calling, but I guess I was wrong

On topic

The Blue Ocean Strategy is about uncontested marketspace. What part of the Wii U strategy is about uncontested marketspace? Iwata answers in a cliche: ‘hardcore market and casual market’. With Kinect and Move, Sony and Microsoft are clearly in ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore’ markets and Nintendo would be competing among those gamers (if you look at it as Iwata is). It is pure Red Ocean.

Adding more power or HD graphics wouldn’t make the Wii U a Red Ocean product. What makes the Wii U a Red Ocean product is the lack of any desire for uncontested marketspace. Talking in cliches and saying, ‘Satisfying both the ‘hardcore’ and the ‘casuals’ “expands the gaming population”‘ makes Iwata sound like the blathering idiots that populate gaming message forums.

the nes was never considered underpowered, the wii was a one trick pony. It was never successfull because of the casuals, it was the motion control gaming that made it popular.

The handheld market is the only way nintendo is able to stay into the computer gaming market at this time, since no one cares about it anymore with all those smartphones.

The switch won't be popular, they should have made a full fledged handheld, now it's going to be an overpriced handheld.

Or maybe they could have made a core console, you know like they used to make.

With the exception of Nintendo handhelds what other product on the market was like the Wii U? How can you say the Wii U was lacking any desire for uncontested marketshare? The Wii U definitely wasn't geared towards Playstation and Xbox gamers, so it definitely wasn't a Red Ocean product. Nintendo simply failed to utilize the gamepad in a way that attracted the mass market, but that doesn't change the fact that Nintendo still develops hardware under the Blue Ocean mentality. Just because they failed this go around doesn't change what their goals were for that device.

Reggie confirms this during this interview.

The problem is the blue ocean strategy (I had to look this up, and it means seeking new market, red ocean means staying in a known market and be competitive, just for those who don't know what it is) worked with the wii, but the wii was a one trick pony. Finding new market isn't that easy, otherwise everybody would do it. That it wasn't easy was quite obvious with the wii u, and it's even going to be more obvious with the switch.

So you're right the wii u was a blue ocean product, otherwise they would not have added that controller, since it drove up the price, they would also not have had a underpowered cpu and it would have released sooner, like in 2010.

That blue ocean strategy is going to do nintendo in, they made such easy money with the wii that they think they can do it again. Why they are so stupid is beyond me, popular products are not that easy to make, they have more to do with luck and the spirit of a certain era than the actually capacity of invention. Otherwise the inventors of those popular products would just make more of those products.

The wii should be seen as the viewmaster, it's a very popular toy that implements new technology, but you can't make popular products like this all the time, since new technology isn't around the corner all the time. It's different with graphics and processing power, games will benefit from extra gpu and cpu power so new consoles keep on having success. Nintendo should have taken the money and stayed in the handheld market, or went full core console again but the switch just like the wii u will just make them lose money and further away from the core console market.

No, that's not right. The MOS 6502 is used for sound and is built into the Ricoh chip. Have a look at the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricoh_2A03

Alright, so the SMS was capable of 32 colours on screen then. But it sure as hell was not anywhere close to the 16-bit consoles (512 colours on Mega Drive / Genesis and 32768 colours on the SNES). The NES is still capable of at least 56 colours. I'm unsure about how the two compare in sprite/tile capabilities, though; it's been ages since I looked into that. I still think that the NES games tended to have better colours and look better, though - it certainly wasn't worlds apart from the Master System.

The Master System didn't beat the NES in Europe. If it did it was a phenomenon localized to one or a handful of countries. It had moderate success in South America, though, I've understood - due to the lack of a local Nintendo distributor, most likely. The SMS games library was so underwhelming to the NES library it's almost like a joke. Then again, Nintendo employed some really shady monopolistic tactics to keep Sega and everybody else from getting third-party support, leaving Sega to have to remake other companies' games for their own console. It's a good thing that changed in the next era though, when Sega came out with the - in all respects - much superior Mega Drive / Genesis.

Yeah, I always disliked the Master System and thought it was pretty shit. Even so, the Master System will always have more appeal to me than Nintendo Switch (or PS4 or Xbox One) because it's a retro platform with its' unique hardware and quirks - and a personality, I dare say - from at the time when video game consoles were still video game consoles and when technical specifications and comparisons actually mattered a whole lot. Let's celebrate the NES and the Master System and take a piss on the Switch!

How do you call it successful when it hasn't even sold close to the amounts of Android/iOS devices and never even managed to outsell the DS? If Sony and Nintendo thought there was a market for them then Sony wouldn't say that there won't be a PS Vita 2 and Nintendo wouldn't make a hybrid device that intends to do away with the practical distinction between handheld and video game console.

It is a replacement, clearly. It's not backwards compatible with the DS or 3DS at all. So, naturally, the long running DS-line is being buried. Otherwise, you're right. It's yet another underpowered machine - and even more so than one might have expected.

Wii U is not a blue ocean console because it was a regular console that was going against Xbox 360 and PS3 before MS and Sony launched their new consoles. Nintendo was hoping a head start of Gen 8 would secure them the top spot, but failed to deliver a concrete message for all consumers of the Wii U, hence it was nothing new but just a sceen attached to the controller. Wii U was a failed Xbox 360 wannabe with a screen attached to the controller and a weak ass CPU. There was nothing innovating about the Wii U nor had anything to do with the Wii. Hell, you couldn't even get all of your Wii purchases on the Wii U as well as having games tied to the hardware, which made a lot of people mad.

Reading the bullshit in this thread is like listening to hobos on the street talk politics.

No it hasn't because if it was nintendo's management wouldn't have had a clue what was going on in that console war. In 2012 the xbox360 and ps3 were already past their expiration date and people were expecting a new console any minute now. This while the wii u was not much better than those old systems.

I really like to know how stupid this management would have been to release a console to compete with these systems, systems that have a 6 year old library. Nintendo is in this business since the eighties and suddenly they would do something stupid like that, I really doubt that.

What the wii u set apart was the ability to play on while the parents were going to watch tv. It also wanted to ride on the success of the wii, hence the complete backwards compatibility and support for pheriperals. Not to mention the specific abilities of the controlpad, using it as a target monitor for instance.

That ocean was a blue as a cloudless sunny day and it failed, now the switch is going to fail again, nobody is waiting for something like this. They might trick some children that think to make a good deal by buying a console and handheld in one. But most will know that this is a weak system compared to a console, not to mention the smartphone is a major competitor in the mobilie market.

The switch could very well be the start of nintendo's demise. If they wanted to keep in the console race they should have go fully for it and made major investments. Now I can see them only survive on the handheld market and as game devs. Maybe they'll do something with vr who knows, but the switch is going to make them poorer.

@commander: Wii U was also competing against the Xbox One and PS4 of course! Guess what? That's not Blue Ocean when you're directly competing those 2, and they lost badly! Nothing on Wii U screamed blue ocean because it was an overpriced junk console that wasn't nearly cheaper than the original PS4 in 2013 before Ninty decided to slash the price, it had no software to sway buyers to buy a Wii U over a PS4, and it still had the worst Online experience vs Xbox Live. Also, where were the sports games? Where were 3rd parties? All gave up after 1 year of release because the PS4 was gaining momentum and hype due to its value over Wii U.

Blue Ocean is about untapping the market with an affordable alternative, that is ease of use, has better support, and has software to back up to build a loyalty brand. Nintendo blew up everything what made the Wii sell all because they started to listen to internet gaming forums.

@commander: Nintendo's demise really began with the Nintendo 64. What we're seeing now is the demise of video game consoles. The brief success and popularity of the Wii was just a fad that misled some people into believing that Nintendo were destined to become a dominant player in the games industry again.

Nope. The rising popularity of tablets and smartphones resulted in that their newfound ("casual") market slipped out of their hands and their control. There's nothing they could've done about it, except to have been more receptive to the changes in the market.

When did Nintendo consoles push the envelope for game music? Oh, that's right... A very long time ago:

@Pedro said:

It might bad, very very baaaaddddd.

how were they competing with the xbox one and the ps4 if you don't have support for multiplats. Don't you think they knew their system was going to be lacking, they knew very well their system was not going to cut it when the ps4 and xboxone released. You act like the management don't have a clue about hardware, when the develompent started of the wiiu, games were already making use of power that the wii u would never have, and this was still in a pre 4k time.

It was never designed to support the core market, imagine if the ps4 and xboxone were actually strong consoles, don't forget that these are the weakest consoles of any generation (relatively speaking of course) and still they blow the wii u out of the water.

The wii u was nothing more than nintendos attempt to keep on riding on the success of the wii, hence the name and the support for all the games and pheriperals out of the box, and again, the pad was a sort of gimmick just like the motion control was on the wii, have you forgotten the implemention of the second screen. It had all sort of stuff, a accellerometer, a gyroscope, a magnetometer, I could even emulate the wii sensor bar. It was again about some sort of motion control gaming but this time with the use of a second screen. That's blue ocean all over the place there for you

When nintendo saw how much money they could make with the wii without making the major investments like sony and microsoft, they tried it again. After that failure they are still trying it now with the switch.

Btw, the wii u was not overpriced, it price was relavitevly high because of that gamepad. You could not even buy the wii u without that gamepad.

@commander: They were competing to get the CoD crowd and other fad shooters! Also, have you ever read the Blue Ocean Strategy book? Maybe you should check this out and understand how Blue Ocean truly works?

@FireEmblem_Man:

By the time the Wii U came out the PS3 and 360 had already sold well over 70+ million units each, so there was no way Nintendo was going to compete with that market coming out 7 yrs after the fact and without much improvement. Hardcore gamers were not going to take the Wii U seriously as a primary device.

Nintendo used 7th generation level hardware in the Wii U because, 1. They were new to HD development, 2nd. It was cheaper. The tablet was already expensive enough, so they had to keep everything else cheap to sell this at a decent price without losing a ton of profit.

Its quite obvious that Nintendo wanted the Wii U to be another Wii like success by trying to appeal to bigger audience than Sony and Microsoft, but unfortunately for Nintendo it flopped. It still was a Blue Ocean focused console.

Gamecube was Nintendo's last Red Ocean console. This Blue Ocean mentality started with Iwata and I hope it ends with the Switch if it flops too.

@commander: Oh. And here I thought that I heard them saying back then that they deliberately designed the Wii U to win back "the core gamer":

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Wii-U-miyamoto-Casual-Gamer-core-gamer-Iwata,news-11465.html

Again, it was them who also created this divide to begin with. Talk about shooting themselves in the foot.

Original Wii had COD games as well, so your argument is flawed. How the hell would Nintendo compete for the COD crowd with its horrible Online Infrastructure? The Wii U was definitely not the most COD friendly environment. You act like Nintendo advertised COD on the level of Microsoft. Wasn't even close. It was just thrown out there with other multiplats just to say "We got those games too."

@emgesp: Gamecube was still kinda blue ocean. Wind Waker cartoon design, controller designed to appeal to beginner gamers, purple color, rumble pak, wireless controller, camera stick, make cheap device so parents can afford, etc.

@emgesp: For the last time, Wii U is not Red Ocean. The gamepad brought nothing new, no simplified interface, shoe horned touch screen, and too many buttons for anyone that prefers the Wii Mote's simplicity. Nothing screams simple with the Wii other than copying the design and repeating the name. Even Iwata stated that the Wii U was not Blue Ocean

Source

Let me go through this…

So, the first thing that we did when we designed the Wii U console was to think about what we could do to enhance and refresh the Wii experience.

We started by looking at some of the things that we wanted to achieve, but weren’t fully able to, with the original Wii console. And, we also looked at things like technological advancements in terms of the penetration of HDTV, and we have incorporated it into the Wii U console.

Stop the tape. This has nothing to do with the question. Of course you are going to upgrade your console technologically. Durrr. That happens with all consumer products. Blue Ocean Strategy is about uncontested marketspace. The investor wants to know why the Wii U does not suggest it is going to any uncontested marketspace. And if the Wii U isn’t going for uncontested marketspace, what is the Wii U’s strategy in the contested space?

Resume the tape.

What we are proposing this time with Wii U is a console that will give those consumers who did not even have an opportunity to interact with the Wii system, more opportunities to connect with and use the Wii U console and, at the same time, offer the consumers who desire those high-quality HD visuals in their gameplay, a product that will meet their needs as well.

So let me get this straight. The reason why consumers did not play the Wii enough was because of lack of opportunities? Apparently, baseball games were such a problem that the console must now resort to being played in the controller? Why even bother buying a home console then? Why not just buy a handheld? This isn’t uncontested marketspace. This is where handheld games occupy. If someone is playing the PlayStation 3 and another person walks in and demands to watch the baseball game, that person could switch to the PSP or Vita or DS. How is this a new market space?

In Nintendo’s E3 Presentation, I mentioned that there are now two categories of consoles: one for casual players, and the other is for core gamers.

Stop the tape.

I am not a ‘hardcore gamer’. I am not a ‘casual gamer’. What the hell am I? Whatever I am, Iwata is telling me that the Wii U is not for me.

Resume the tape.

In our world, what has been said is that there have been two categories of players: one group is casual and the other group is core and that there is a barrier between these two groups.

Stop the tape! Stop the tape!

Who invented the term called ‘bridge games’? Why, that would be Mr. Iwata! Now, Iwata is saying ‘bridge games’ never existed?

Mario Kart Wii was a ‘bridge game’. So was ‘Super Mario Brothers 5’. And on the DS, so was NSMB DS. These so-called ‘bridge games’ are all Old School-esque games. It is a philosophy of gaming Nintendo has been running away from since the N64. Maybe a single definition of gaming DOES exist. Hell, a single definition exists for movies, novels, theaters, and music.

Gaming wasn’t invented by computers. Gaming has carried on through millenniums just fine. If Nintendo made cars, they would be re-inventing the wheel because they never accepted a single definition of ‘transportation’.

Resume this stupid tape.

We believe novice players, who started playing games as casual players (since there is no one who is inherently a core gamer), come to have a budding interest in games and spend a greater amount of time with gameplay so that they mature into core gamers. What we have tried to do with the Wii U console is to create an environment where we can break down the barrier that exists between those two groups and provide, on a single console, an experience that will satisfy both types of users. Through that process we continue to expand the gaming population.

It’s called the NES. It’s called arcade games. You guys did all this before. Old School gaming satisfies both. But you don’t want to face that reality.

Iwata’s talk of hardcore and casual is slang and has no place in a business discussion. When Blue Ocean Strategy is brought up (which is not slang), Iwata refuses to talk business and continues to talk slang.

Reggie Fils-Aime, standing beside him, also refuses to speak up on this question.

I believe the concept of the “Blue Ocean” conveys the idea that if you try to have too broad of a focus, then you may not have as great of an impact, or things may not go as well as you desire. So, part of the philosophy of the Blue Ocean strategy is to really bring your focus into a specific area by “abandoning” or “eliminating” some good ideas.

Stop the tape.

Iwata is revealing he has no idea what the Blue Ocean Strategy is. Maybe he should look it up before he declares it is the company’s direction.

You don’t ‘abandon’ or ‘eliminate’ good ideas in Blue Ocean. Blue Ocean means not competing directly. Sega Genesis versus Super Nintendo is Red Ocean. They are competing at the same level. PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 is Red Ocean. They are competing on the same plane. Wii was Blue Ocean because instead of competing on graphics (which was overshooting the market anyway), Wii focused on the interface and found an uncontested market.

Have I been in bizarro world the last five years? Wii has performed extremely well in the market while the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 have performed badly. The Wii direction was clearly the correct move. Nintendo did the graphics race with the Gamecube and the Industry still avoided putting its games onto the system.

--

You know what my problem with all this is? I don’t care if Nintendo wants to go Red Ocean. What angers me, and what should be seen as fraud to investors, is Nintendo declaring their strategy is ‘mass market’ while employing tactics and strategies that are ‘narrow market’. To see what I mean, listen to what Iwata says next.

@FireEmblem_Man: Who the hell said Blue Ocean has to be simple in design? Again, you keep saying what the Wii U didn't do right, but it doesn't change the fact that Nintendo was going after a different market than Sony and Microsoft. Do you honestly believe the Wii U was made to appeal to Xbox and Playstation fans? Are you really that delusional?

Gamecube was NOT Blue Ocean, it was Red Ocean and failed to even go above 30 million sales

Gamecube was a straight up evolution of the N64 which had cartoony games as well.

This trailer begs to differ. All of those 3rd party games that were announced either were cancelled or at least was release showed how much Nintendo was going after a narrowed audience that ISN'T BLUE OCEAN. You think those elderly people wanted to play Darksiders, or your mom willing to dedicate her time playing Mass Effect? Again, my point is those games were not intended to the Blue Ocean market.

@emgesp: True, Nintendo has always been blue ocean in my eyes. Even back when they tried to revolutionize gaming during the arcade era or save the industry during the gaming crash. They have always tried to make gaming more accessible and create their own market. They did this blue ocean strategy even before they made video games.

he is a die hard nintendo fan, it was quite obvious to me when he called the nes underpowered for its generation.

@commander: The person your talking about has been very critical of Nintendo. A little critical thinking is good for the industry.

LOL! You really know that I'm more of a Lem than a sheep!

good for you, xbox is the better system, but I still don't agree with the red ocean wii u. It was just marketing by nintendo, they knew very well the wii u was never going to be able to compete this generation.

Like I said, you should read the Blue Ocean book