The price of the NX is going to be hugely important.

Who's talking lifetime sales?

Mario Sunshine was over a million it's first month. Hell, in Japan alone it was over half a million units.

Face it, it's failing.

The system's quality and power is what's going to sell it. That's what sold the XB1 and PS4 and both launched at the $400+ mark versus the Wii U's $299 mark.

History has proved... release with a 5* Mario game to make an essential purchase.

Mario Sunshine didnt even break 1 million in Japan for lifetime sales, again, we dont have the numbers, stop reaching.

Here's the Super Mario Maker sales

NPD: Super Mario Maker Drives 110 Percent Lift In Wii U Hardware Sales

Yeah to the hardcore Nintendo fan base, but not PS4/XB1 owners.

Then it needs to be a noticeable leap in horsepower.

If the NX is only about as powerful as the PS4 then it will flop just as bad as the Wii U.

I think that's they sweet spot. Anything over $400 seems to turn off gamers. $500 from Nintendo would be devastating.

Nice, thanks, its looking pretty good with it selling 300k in Japan alone as of Oct-11.

Media Create Sales: Week 41, 2015 (Oct 05 - Oct 11)

I had forgot the numbers were released, not sure how it slipped my mind.

Nintendo reports Super Mario Maker sells 1million +.

Nintendo's pigeon-holed themselves into what they can ask. Their boxes have become 1st party machines, so value of their console will depend on whether people are interested in their games, and as we've seen with the U's sales numbers that are the worst in the company's entire history for a main console, they indicate that Nintendo's software is holding a very niche (and apparently shrinking) appeal. They need a machine capable of making easy ports for third parties, yet they can't much ask the price for such a capable hardware because third parties (and the audience) is elsewhere and they are selling to a niche demographic that has shown ever shrinking numbers gen after gen.

Unless Nintendo's willing to take major losses in getting great hardware out, they've really screwed the pooch and I don't see many options for them. I honestly don't think they can get away asking more than $300, tops. It's going to be very curious to see what Nintendo decides on. They've put themselves in a terrible position.

Price wont be higher than PS4, that will be the system its competing against. 3rd Parties wont support this system though. Those days are over. Nintendo needs to push their 1st parties like its no tomorrow. Nintendo gamers need to support Nintendo.

I see two price points for Nintendo

$299 - 30-50% more powerful then the PS4 and x bone

$399 - 2-3x more powerful then the PS4 and x bone

They have me sold with the $399 option. Theres no way I can turn down a possible openworld Pixar looking Mario in 1080p at 60fps

I think it isn't for me, but for the masses of course. Price is always important. But if you think about it (which the masses won't), the monthly fee (if there is any) and the game pricing are way more important than whether the console is $300 or $500. That doesn't make that much of a difference.

I also think that if their price is near that of a XB1 or PS4 it's going to be constantly compared in the very skewed ways that consolites compare things. It may be advantageous to have a higher price so that it's its own thing.

$399.99 is quite expensive for a Mario box. Nintendo should aim for a lower price to grow the install base faster.

The console needs to be competitive, just being more powerful isn't gonna cut it.

Its gonna depends on what 3rd parties says about NX devkits...iirc 3rd parties already said Wii U devkits was too weak...sure they were PR onboard at E3 after E3 pretty much all just ran away. :P

They should bring back the phrase "now you're playing with power"... wanna hear it one more time before they're making games for Apple or Facebook.

I hope they ditch that name too, if they should take any name they should go back to Revolution, not because I think it sounds the catchiest, but because I think it's highly marketable to be able to co-opt from other media, for instance have someone do a cover of The Beatles' Revolution song in its marketing, Beatles are fucking catchy, they're "bigger than Jesus", they alone keep oldies alive... oh there's probably other catch songs that center around the word they can use, historical speeches they can co-opt as marketing symbols.

You guys seem to forget though that this is likely going to be their console + handheld.
Normally I buy their handheld and their console. So if they put the two together, people like me (all ten) would be quite OK with it being more expensive than a PS5/Xbox 2.
One platform for all Nintendo stuff would be super convenient.

Xbox One's APU chip.

Avoid Xbox One's mistakes i.e. replace 32 MB SRAM with another 14 CU for a total 28 CU GPU.

@ronvalencia said:

@emgesp said:

Let's take a moment and think about a hard fact that Nintendo has to take into consideration.

The NX console is going to be released mid generation and will be competing against two consoles currently priced at $349.99 bundled with games. I also wouldn't be surprised if we saw one, or both of those consoles getting a $299.99 SKU by the end of 2016.

How on Earth can the NX succeed (Home Console platform) if its priced higher than the competition? A premium price wouldn't be a big deal if the NX was released at the tail end of the current generation, but all signs are pointing to a 2016 release. Let's also not forget that 2016 is looking to be a strong year for both the PS4 and XB1 in terms of software. I just don't see how Nintendo is going to have a successful launch. It would literally have to be an incredibly revolutionary product for people outside of the Nintendo hardcore base to even take notice.

Xbox One's APU chip.

Avoid Xbox One's mistakes i.e. replace 32 MB SRAM with another 14 CU for a total 28 CU GPU.

Can you tell me how much Tflops we'd see with 28 CU's at around 800 - 850 Mhz?

They should price it at $350.

They should continue the strategy they've adopted and dive deep. Don't chase the big guys (Sony/MS), create a box with a decent profit/unit ratio since thy're not likely to sell a lot of units regardless.

They need to go back to their old magic number.... $199.99!

Well, at the absolute worst, an 800mhz clock speed would put it exactly where the 7950 is, 2.87 teraflops. Of course that's discounting GCN's two revisions (the 2xx and 3xx series cards) the R9 Nano's huge efficiency gains, the arctic islands architecture and 14 nm.

So it's safe to say it would be around 3 teraflops with a more efficient architecture, if it were to have just 28 CU's.

That would be pretty sweet, especially if its priced in the $299 - $349 range.

As far as memory is concerned, do you think they go GDDR5 or HBM? I'd be shocked if they stuck with the DDR3 + eDRAM setup found in the Wii U.

I reckon it will be less than $400. How they market it will matter a lot. They have to convince people to buy a new console mid cycle. Nintendo has to pull a rabbit out of a hat here. It won't be good enough to just have superior hardware, if that is the case. Folks have to be able to justify another console purchase and feel that their current machines aren't good enough. A tall order for anyone.

I think Gddr5 is off the table, Nintendo likes low latency memory. HBM would be ideal, it's like one huge pool of eDRAM but Nintendo will want to put at least 16GB's (I'm thinking 24GB's really) in there so i'm not sure if they could afford that much. Maybe they'll go the gamecube route and use different kinds of memory in the perfect amounts.

It's price is hugely important. But so is it's power, it's marketing, it's 1st party games, and it's 3rd party support. Not to mention it's very nature: digital only? Mobile/handheld/console integration?

I see two possibilities: Very powerful (PS4+ levels), with a high cost, and hopefully an attempt to bang out some AAA titles Nintendo fans have been begging for (proper Metroid and Zelda titles, it's been half a decade of a wait for each) along with getting as many 3rd party games as possible. Even a few flagship ones like say Fallout 4, or the next Mass Effect would help kill that "last gen kiddy box" image the WiiU has.

Other possibility is just another WiiU style system. Low power, low price, little 3rd party support, some awesome 1st party titles but very long droughts between them.

The first possibility seems very unlikely to me, but the the second seems suicidal. Basically, I don't see how the NX can be anything other then a poor man's PS4 or another WiiU.

I'll get it, I love Nintendo, but I can't help but fear a disaster, and an end to their home consoles. Wish they hadn't f*cked up the WiiU so catastrophically. Everything that could go wrong with that system did, they did nothing with their year head start :(

Does current HBM tech support more than 4GB's of stacked ram? I'm thinking they might have to do two pools of memory to get more than 4GB's of ram.

Both Xbox One and Wii U's DDR3 + small low latency embedded ram configurations are failures when compared to PS4's memory configuration i.e. maximize the CU count at a given chip size.

Nintendo should NOT follow Xbox One's memory config. HBM doesn't share the main APU chip.

Shader programs are usually optimized for CU's local SRAM storage, hence higher CU count = better.

Both MS and Nintendo are f**king clowns when running current 3D game engines. Hope Nintendo doesn't repeat Xbox One and Wii U design concepts.

Wii U's main IGP + EDRAM chip.

Wii U has the same mistake as Xbox One i.e. chip area space wasted for embedded ram.

Wii U's chip area could have supported about 2.5X IGP over the current Wii U.

@emgesp: HBM 2 does. I'm not sure if it's even possible for them to get 16GB of it in 2016 though.

Maybe they'll have something like 16GB+ of DDR3/4 and 8GB of HBM2? That'd make it the 9th generation equivalent of the Dreamcast memory wise, and part of why I say it'll need so much system memory because of how bloated these console OS's are getting.

I'm convinced the console will be at least 3TF, but we'll just have to wait and see. I think Nintendo got a kick in the ass and they know they can't be left behind hardware wise anymore.

@ronvalencia: Yeah, I don't think there's any point to eDRAM anymore with HBM here so I don't think they'll be wasting chip space on the NX.

For a given chip area size, PS4's approach is superior and it delivered superior results.

PS4's approach at Xbox One's APU size would have been ~28 CU GPU.

@emgesp: The console could be $5 and come with a $4 mail-in rebate and I still wouldn't be interested.

Hey what happened to Coolyfett referring to himself in the third person? At least I thought that was you who did it...

Yeah it's going to be an important part for sure. I would probably buy it at a fairly high price since I'm a sucker, but for most other people $300-350 starting would probably be good.