Author Topic: Switchmas Eve Rumors and Speculations Thread  (Read 663920 times)

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Offline Ian Sane

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #525 on: January 14, 2016, 07:13:24 PM »
Eh, looking back I think Nintendo made the right choice with cartridges. The games are still better on n64 than on Playstation. All those FMVs look horrible(I never though much of them then anyhow) The fmvs gave allthese people a false opinion Playstation was better. It is still a false opinion. They were the gimmick.

The thing is the games left because of the cartridges and gamers followed and really that makes sense.  You just spent the last generation enjoying all these games from companies like Nintendo, Square, Capcom, Konami and then everything splits so that Nintendo is on one side and everyone else is on the other.  Unless you like Nintendo's output more than all of those other companies' combined you were going to go PlayStation.  And the people that stuck with the N64 and have stuck with Nintendo for all these years are the people the value Nintendo's output more than everyone else's put together.  Most people don't have such Nintendo-centric tastes as the Wii U demonstrates.

Really it's about money, isn't it?  Third parties didn't give a **** about load times and durability or even the superior specs of the N64.  At the core of it creating CD games was WAY cheaper so they went in that direction.  Nintendo was insisting on other businesses to spend more money on development and most of them rejected it, just like they do NOW.

Offline ThePerm

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #526 on: January 14, 2016, 07:47:11 PM »
They didn't care much about making good games. You have a handful of good games on playstation. You have some games that are "good", but were overrated to me. The games that really stick out were Metal Gear,  Resident Evil, Tekken. I think ff7 is a highly flawed game, and never thought it was fun.

You have to think, it wasn't so much that Nintendo went with cartridges, they just stayed with cartridges. They had deals with companies that made cd based tech, but they fell through. You got a decade of **** not working out between Sony and Phillips. If everyone recalls it was Panasonic who finally hooked Nintendo up. CD was never going to work for Nintendo. Things finally came around in the DVD generation. Once they got situated with optical technology they were able to move forward with it.

Speaking of which. Maybe we'll be going back to carts? They're bigger than BLU-Rays now. I imagine the future is mainly digital, but there are some nice advantages to having some sort of physical media.

https://jet.com/product/detail/63f29fda27ac49ae81884a21b7668798?jcmp=pla:ggl:electronics_a2:electronics_accessories_memory_flash_memory_a2_other:na:na:na:na:na:2&code=PLA15&k_clickid=6ccd5110-69f2-4f9b-bd3a-67e75469962c&abkId=403-186666&gclid=Cj0KEQiAq920BRC8-efn57XrotYBEiQAlVlMQ-jwuUzq10vUQ-3Ex6Yv3H-EDnMsgOW8oy-ebhMUc4EaAqog8P8HAQ
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Offline Evan_B

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #527 on: January 14, 2016, 09:33:10 PM »
I am prepared to give my soul to a glorious, cart-based future.
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Offline MagicCow64

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #528 on: January 15, 2016, 01:41:35 AM »
Nintendo is supposedly notorious for being unfriendly for third parties.  Like they won't document the console worth a **** and if you phone their support they have to contact NCL in Japan and then it takes days to get a simple response because of all the translating and back and forth between countries in different time zones.  Days and weeks of wasted time and thus wasted money go by.

Honestly, fixing this will likely solve their 3rd party issue more than anything.  Just having an office (or two) in NA with people trained to help developers would make a difference.  They could go all out and invite devs to workshops or make house calls.  NOA (and NOE) should have this as a core function.

Yeah, that would definitely be a good move, but one that would likely end up with Nintendo taking on porting and marketing costs for these games as well, and that's probably not a climate they want to encourage. But still, I'd wager that porting between the 360 and PS3 was probably a bigger pain in the ass than porting between 360 and Wii U then/now, and probably will have been a bigger pain in the ass than porting between a theoretical Arm NX and PS4/Xbone in the future. Nintendo could certainly be a better port midwife, but I still question how many western third-parties would bother short of basically licensing games to Nintendo to port and promote themselves. Which I reiterate they probably should do anyway, but I doubt there's much Nintendo can do to attract these pinatas to the yard aside from distributing moneyhats.

Offline BlackNMild2k1

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #529 on: January 15, 2016, 07:59:13 AM »
Speaking of which. Maybe we'll be going back to carts? They're bigger than BLU-Rays now. I imagine the future is mainly digital, but there are some nice advantages to having some sort of physical media.

https://jet.com/product/detail/63f29fda27ac49ae81884a21b7668798?jcmp=pla:ggl:electronics_a2:electronics_accessories_memory_flash_memory_a2_other:na:na:na:na:na:2&code=PLA15&k_clickid=6ccd5110-69f2-4f9b-bd3a-67e75469962c&abkId=403-186666&gclid=Cj0KEQiAq920BRC8-efn57XrotYBEiQAlVlMQ-jwuUzq10vUQ-3Ex6Yv3H-EDnMsgOW8oy-ebhMUc4EaAqog8P8HAQ

That's still $'s for a blank medium vs ¢'s on a disc.
3rd parties will still rather go multi-disc than single cartridge, just from a cost standpoint alone.

Offline Adrock

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #530 on: January 15, 2016, 08:52:52 AM »
Digital games make the cost of media less of an issue though they, admittedly, don't erase the issue. The only way Nintendo can get away with ditching optical discs from its consoles if it the physical media is cross-platform between console and handheld since optical discs just aren't practical on handhelds. Being available to both audiences also helps justify the change.

Offline Evan_B

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #531 on: January 15, 2016, 11:13:32 AM »
Which is why the NX handheld should be single screen and cart based while the the home console, also cart based, unlocks dual screen capability and DS/3DS backwards compatability.
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Offline Ian Sane

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #532 on: January 15, 2016, 12:57:54 PM »
I like carts but if they go with carts then I hope you like how the Wii U gets like six games a year because that's what will continue.  Nintendo has no leg to stand on.  No third party will be willing to pay more for development on a Nintendo console development than they do for the other consoles and cartridges cost more than discs.

Offline Stratos

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #533 on: January 15, 2016, 03:33:00 PM »
Unless Nintendo decides to foot the bill for the extra medium cost, which will never happen.
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Offline Stogi

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #534 on: January 15, 2016, 03:54:39 PM »
They would if the carts were ambidextrous. If it worked for the NX and the 4DS, there's a chance they would foot the bill.
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Offline ThePerm

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #535 on: January 15, 2016, 04:45:48 PM »
I like carts but if they go with carts then I hope you like how the Wii U gets like six games a year because that's what will continue.  Nintendo has no leg to stand on.  No third party will be willing to pay more for development on a Nintendo console development than they do for the other consoles and cartridges cost more than discs.

I think we've established that discs are dead though, and carts still have a future/are cheap now/have storage space better than a blu-ray/are more portable/more durable.

Going back to carts only seems logical now. In a year 128GB solid state media will cost $69.99 retail...because they already do.

http://tinyurl.com/jbd2mdl

That's more than enough space to hold 4k video and whatever else you would need.
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Offline Adrock

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #536 on: January 15, 2016, 05:24:24 PM »
While I strongly favor ditching optical media, I think there's potential for backlash. If third parties are looking for a reason, they'll find one. The cost of media could be one such reason. At the same time, if Nintendo is smart about it, perhaps third parties wouldn't resist such a change.

1. Flash media is pretty cheap these days, and it continues to drop in price. For example, if you're diligent, you can get a 32 GB SDHC Class 10 Card for around $10. Consider that it's still sold at a profit.

2. Nintendo sets the price of its proprietary media. An N64 cart cost third parties $20 each for what, usually like 4 or 8 MB? Most games these days are under 32 GB. Nintendo shouldn't be trying to make money this way. I'd like to see third parties purchase media directly from the company that manufactures it instead of having to go through Nintendo and get charged extra. It's certainly Nintendo's right to do what it pleases as the hardware manufacturer, but it's still a crummy way of doing business. More importantly, Nintendo isn't in the position to get away with it anymore.

3. Cut third parties a deal on licensing if they release a retail version, maybe even add incentives based on a title's sales. For example, for every million physical copies sold, Nintendo foots part of the bill on subsequent runs.

Offline Ian Sane

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #537 on: January 15, 2016, 05:47:47 PM »
Nintendo sets the price of its proprietary media. An N64 cart cost third parties $20 each for what, usually like 4 or 8 MB? Most games these days are under 32 GB. Nintendo shouldn't be trying to make money this way. I'd like to see third parties purchase media directly from the company that manufactures it instead of having to go through Nintendo and get charged extra. It's certainly Nintendo's right to do what it pleases as the hardware manufacturer, but it's still a crummy way of doing business. More importantly, Nintendo isn't in the position to get away with it anymore.

This here is why whenever someone defends the N64 with nonsense about Nintendo caring so much about load times compromising their games I roll my eyes.  THIS was the reason they stuck with carts more than anything.  They loved making money off of the media and had the hubris to assume third parties would put up with it despite an alternative being available from a competitor.

Nintendo operates like a penny pinching small businessman who thinks that if he "accidently" gives people the wrong change and buys cheaper toilet paper for the bathroom that that will earn him the big bucks, all while he completely ignores the mass of potential customers he turns off with his bullshit.  You earn money from third parties with license fees.  A console maker gets a cut of every game sold so it's in their best interest to have lots of third parties games that sell lots of copies.  Nintendo doesn't think like that.  They're hung up on exploiting third parties thinking that that is where the moolah will be but it backfires because it costs them support.  If third parties don't support you you make NO MONEY off of them.

Nintendo has the same philosophy with hardware.  "If we cheap out on the hardware we can have a higher profit margin on each console sold."  **** any other excuse, THAT is why the Wii was the way it was.  Of course the flaw in this reasoning is that weaker hardware results in an inferior product which is a harder sell.  A small profit margin on a better product stands to make more money in the long run by creating a larger userbase for which to sell games to.  Oh and if the third party support is healthy then THOSE games sell better too and Nintendo gets a cut of all of that.  And better third party support improves the perceived quality of the console so that increases console sales... which increase the potential sales of every game released all of which Nintendo gets some money from and the whole things perpetuates.  But Nintendo always pisses all of that away because they're hung up on exploiting everyone in the short term.

They're the creep businessman that figures that screwing over a customer once and losing him forever is worth more than years of repeat business at a smaller profit margin per visit.

Offline Stogi

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #538 on: January 15, 2016, 06:01:53 PM »
But my cartridges still work.
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Offline Adrock

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #539 on: January 15, 2016, 06:24:15 PM »
This here is why whenever someone defends the N64 with nonsense about Nintendo caring so much about load times compromising their games I roll my eyes.  THIS was the reason they stuck with carts more than anything.  They loved making money off of the media and had the hubris to assume third parties would put up with it despite an alternative being available from a competitor.
Why exactly can't both be true? While Nintendo does indeed like having control over its hardware (that is one of the perks of being a hardware manufacturer), it isn't inconcievable that Nintendo cared about load times and such as well. Nintendo has always cared about the game experience to the point where it flat-out cancelled nearly finished games (e.g. Star Fox 2). I don't really see how you can view this as only hubris. There were a variety of reasons for sticking with cartridges. The entire SNES CD-drive saga was a mess, and Sony almost took Nintendo for a ride. Maybe Nintendo overreacted and kept its cards way to close to the chest after that. Going forward with Sony's deal would have been really awful for Nintendo. Sticking with cartridges ultimately cost Nintendo dearly, but too many things happened to blame it all on arrogance.

Personally, I think CDs sucked as a medium for video games. I've never been fond of optical media in general though, admittedly, there have been enough technological advances to make it not absolutely terrible. The original PlayStation was rocking a 2x CD-ROM drive. Ew. Optical media technology in the mid to late 90s just wasn't very good. We all dealt with it obviously. In retrospect, I don't think it was very conducive for the gameplay experiences I wanted. It was a lot of waiting, a lot of bad FMV.

Offline ThePerm

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #540 on: January 15, 2016, 11:23:00 PM »
You know what was great? Me and my buddy played Mortal Kombat 4 every day. Occasionally we would go to his house. He had a playstation. I had an n64. We got right into the game to play on n64. When we went to his house, we had to wait to play.

Then another time I went over to someones house and he was showing off all the games, like Metal Gear, or Final Fantasy. He had a hard on for FF7, I just didn't see the appeal. What was even weirder was he would walk around the pre-rendered backgrounds which were just jpegs, and then the monster battle would happen and the characters would have a totally different inconsistent design. Its like one of those movies where the movie is bad, but its filled with all the special effect gimmicks.

eventually my brother won a Playstation in a raffle. I had got ff7 and metal gear. ff7 did not grow on me,. Metal Gear was an exciting adventure. Until I got to the second disc. The second disc did not work. I tried renting a game I owned, still did not work. I eventually had to finish the game on gamecube. Playstation did have Resident Evil games. Which although were similar to ff7 in design, were much more exciting. Still kinda bad because they were 3d games not designed for a 3d controller.

on n64 you had all those great n64 games and the only one that had a load time was a not so great Shadowman.

Most psx games sucked except a handful. I don't know how you can reconcile Nintendo's profit motivation with 3rd party profit motivation. It led several game companies to drop quality. The work done by developers on n64 was what I thought of as a higher pursuit. Sure, there are some shitty games on n64. Most games however hold up much better through the lens of time.
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Offline BranDonk Kong

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #541 on: January 15, 2016, 11:29:31 PM »
Nintendo stuck with cartridges because could make money off of them, and they didn't want to deal with licensing and using CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs from other companies. That's it. It had nothing to do with load times. The GameCube had excellent load times.
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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #542 on: January 15, 2016, 11:39:20 PM »
Cartridges being a lot harder to pirate was a big part of it too. And the GameCube didn't have issues with load times because the tech had improved a whole hell of a lot from the 2x CD drives of the mid-'90s.
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Offline nickmitch

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #543 on: January 16, 2016, 01:12:34 AM »
I wonder how hard it will be to sell carts (as the default) to people for the next generation of consoles.  Like, it would be one of those super practical changes, but I feel like regular people would be weirded out for some reason.
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Offline Luigi Dude

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #544 on: January 16, 2016, 02:28:00 AM »
I wonder how hard it will be to sell carts (as the default) to people for the next generation of consoles.  Like, it would be one of those super practical changes, but I feel like regular people would be weirded out for some reason.

Any carts Nintendo uses would basically be like the DS/3DS ones which are still pretty common to a whole generation of people.  If Nintendo's goal with the NX is to make the handheld and home console closer to each other, sharing carts would make sense and the overwhelming majority of people who still play Nintendo games are used to them as the 3DS shows.
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Offline nickmitch

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #545 on: January 16, 2016, 02:42:11 AM »
Yeah, I had a longer version of the post until I realized Nintendo has been doing it the whole time, especially with increasing capacity of 3DS carts (that's been going up, right?).  But for "the other side" (read: people who don't play Nintendo systems) how do Sony and MS sell people on that idea? How do those people react? I try to picture myself explaining to my friends a disc-free future (which is inevitable) that still needs physical media, and all I can picture is bewilderment.
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Offline Triforce Hermit

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #546 on: January 16, 2016, 08:38:22 AM »
You know for a fact that if Nintendo went back to cartridges for consoles, the internet would be screaming at the top of their lungs like children.
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Offline Adrock

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #547 on: January 16, 2016, 11:03:11 AM »
Nintendo stuck with cartridges because could make money off of them, and they didn't want to deal with licensing and using CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs from other companies. That's it. It had nothing to do with load times.
Well, that isn't true. Nintendo managed to get around licensing fees since transitioning to optical media by disabling movie and music playback. It never believed in optical media until technology advanced enough to allow it to not be awful. And Nintendo still talks about the advantages of ROM cartridges. Nintendo didn't stick with cartridges for any one single reason. The reasons were collectively all the things that have already been discussed.

Nintendo might have gotten away with it if it gave a damn about third parties at all. It never has outside of token attempts there and there, even in the 8-bit and 16-bit days some people look so fondly on. The article isn't available anymore besides snippets here and there, but Emily Roger's "The Sexual History Between Nintendo and Electronic Arts" illustrated this pretty well. It wasn't until Dan Adelman tried to change the culture within Nintendo when it came to indie developers that any headway was made, and he ended up leaving Nintendo about a year and a half ago.

As a company that was homegrown and family owned for decades, it's obvious why Nintendo operates in a bubble. Shigeru Miyamoto created Mario and Donkey Kong because Nintendo couldn't get the rights to Popeye. Then, Universal sued Nintendo for copyright infringement because it cornered the giant gorilla market or something. Next, Sony reached out with a "partnership" that had extremely one-sided terms. Negative dealings with other companies happens enough times and you start getting xenophobic. That doesn't make it right, but it's easy to see where the attitude comes from.

Nintendo seemed to soften its stance on many things once Hiroshi Yamauchi stepped down, but it never lost its desire to remain self-sufficient and independent. That's a different kind of problem though. Sony and Microsoft are overly reliant on third party software. That has gotten so bad that Phil Spencer said in August that Microsoft plans to focus more on first party exclusives. Nintendo's problem seems to be that it thinks it can't do its own thing while also opening the doors and giving back a little.

However, Nintendo has done a better job in recent years, not a good job but a better one. It's licensing out its IPs, making partnerships, and reaching out in unprecedented ways. It's a start, but Nintendo has to get on that. That's my hope for NX. Nintendo doesn't have to stop the good parts of what makes the company what it is to rid itself of the bad parts. Sony is buying exclusives like there's no tomorrow while Nintendo is practically asking not to be bothered. Can it find a middle ground maybe?
« Last Edit: January 16, 2016, 11:04:48 AM by Adrock »

Offline BranDonk Kong

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #548 on: January 16, 2016, 12:15:55 PM »
I'm not just talking about content licensing (DVD movies), I mean actually purchasing DVD-ROM drives from other companies. Also, yes, drives had gotten faster than the PSX days, but load times on the GameCube were significantly faster than load times on the PS2.
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Offline Evan_B

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Re: NX Rumors and Speculation Thread (Your guess is as good as mine EDITION)
« Reply #549 on: January 16, 2016, 03:26:19 PM »
If Nintendo can do some marketing cornering on Japanese third parties, like what they have already done with Monster Hunter and Yokai Watch, they might be able to prove to western third parties their potential within the boundaries of that handheld.

As it stands, however, I doubt Nintendo will ever really successfully communicate with western third parties outside of indies.
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