Author Topic: Switchmas Eve Rumors and Speculations Thread  (Read 664108 times)

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Offline nickmitch

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With the law of diminishing returns, I wouldn't be surprised if the PS4 and XBONE are around even longer than the PS360 before getting a successor. Unless they decide to go the phone route instead, making a new one or more every year, though I don't know how well that would work for a game system.

Yeah, the PS3 was supposed to last 10 years, right?  I wouldn't be surprised if the PS4 didn't last about that long.  There's no way they'd go the phone route.  It'd be too expensive for devs unless the backwards compatibility was a given.  Plus the online system would have to carry over seamlessly, but that may not be a huge issue.  Now, Bi-annual hardware revisions, I could see happening.  Especially if they come with slight spec bumps (bigger HDDs, more RAM for the OS, etc).
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Offline Spak-Spang

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With the law of diminishing returns, I wouldn't be surprised if the PS4 and XBONE are around even longer than the PS360 before getting a successor. Unless they decide to go the phone route instead, making a new one or more every year, though I don't know how well that would work for a game system.

Yeah, the PS3 was supposed to last 10 years, right?  I wouldn't be surprised if the PS4 didn't last about that long.  There's no way they'd go the phone route.  It'd be too expensive for devs unless the backwards compatibility was a given.  Plus the online system would have to carry over seamlessly, but that may not be a huge issue.  Now, Bi-annual hardware revisions, I could see happening.  Especially if they come with slight spec bumps (bigger HDDs, more RAM for the OS, etc).

Honestly the PS3 could have lasted 10 years.  The problem is that once companies are making profit on the consoles and games, the buzz is gone and the market starts to dwindle...so you need new hype.  You know that one of the other companies is going to jump first, so you start planning your new system.  But honestly Xbox 1 and PS4 could last 10 years, because graphics and gameplay are already pretty amazing...do we really need more? 

I am really curious what this will do for the industry.  Basically Nintendo could be launching a new system mid-life cycle of the current generation.  This will either be great for Nintendo as Nintendo can start being a mid-generation new system for those that are interested in a slight spec jump...but it is also going to force Sony and Microsoft to end their generation earlier than they probably wanted. 
« Last Edit: October 21, 2015, 01:31:15 AM by Spak-Spang »

Offline ShyGuy

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The problem with lasting 10 years is some core gamers start moving to the PC for better performance. We saw some of this in 2011 and 2012.

Offline Ymeegod

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"With the law of diminishing returns"

The thing was you have to recall why Sony and MS needed to extend last generation of consoles.  Both manufactures took heavy loses (Sony with the Cell processor) and MS with the *red" ring of death lawsuit.  So far this generation there hasn't been any "snag" or heavy loss for them so they are already making a profit on their returns. 

I think right now, Sony's unstoppable.  MS needs a  Japanese partner (merger or complete buyout) since it's a totally flop in Japan and has to rethink it's European pricing structure.  Can't win on NA sales alone.

Nintendo has it's own share of problems, namely 3rd parties.  Nintendo needs them to commit and I don't see that happening anytime soon.  Like MS, Nintendo's going have to money hat developers, either buy them outright or buy their support.  Sony's klling it lately, Square's deal the FFVII, Capcom's exclusive SFV, first downloadable content for Activision's BO III.  Sometimes you have to spend money to make money and Nintendo's going have to play that game in order to get back on top.

Offline ThePerm

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We could always bring back that

Nintendo
Xbox

rumor.
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Offline TOPHATANT123

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Wii60 Boys.

Offline Mop it up

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The problem with lasting 10 years is some core gamers start moving to the PC for better performance. We saw some of this in 2011 and 2012.
Do you have some evidence of this? Those two years had some of the highest sales numbers for both PS3 and 360, so I'm not so sure...

Offline Soren

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Given how certain developers treat their PC ports, I don't believe that much either.
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Offline ShyGuy

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Just anecdotal evidence. The gaming press started playing a lot of PC version of games over the console counterparts. Far Cry 3 is an example. Skyrim, Dragon Age, etc... It's not everybody, but there are a number of people who have to have 60fps and wait for Steam sales.

Offline ThePerm

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It could be that developers just follow trends, not actual numbers and statistics.

I know how that sounds.
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Offline broodwars

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With the law of diminishing returns, I wouldn't be surprised if the PS4 and XBONE are around even longer than the PS360 before getting a successor. Unless they decide to go the phone route instead, making a new one or more every year, though I don't know how well that would work for a game system.

Yeah, the PS3 was supposed to last 10 years, right?

*ahem* And it did. It launched in 2006, and it's still getting major software releases in 2016 (Persona 5).
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Offline UncleBob

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With the law of diminishing returns, I wouldn't be surprised if the PS4 and XBONE are around even longer than the PS360 before getting a successor. Unless they decide to go the phone route instead, making a new one or more every year, though I don't know how well that would work for a game system.

Yeah, the PS3 was supposed to last 10 years, right?

*ahem* And it did. It launched in 2006, and it's still getting major software releases in 2016 (Persona 5).

Wii launched in 2006 and still got a major release in 2015. :p
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Offline Louieturkey

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I'd like to point out that when Sony says 10 years, that does not preclude them from releasing another system inbetween. They stated 10 years with the PS2 and did continue support through I think 11 years with it.  PS1 lasted with them selling it for 10 years as well.   My guess is the PS3 will be sold through 2018 at this point making it a 12 year console.

I think the PS4/XB1 will last as far as MS decides to keep it on the market.  They are really the ones who have been impatient in the past and I think if they continue to be second place and continue to lose money on the XB1, they will either start the next gen earlier than most hope or sell the Xbox division and get out of the console market.  I think Sony is in the same mindset of Nintendo in that they want to ride the system as long as they can like Nintendo with the original NES.

I guess with the rumor of this thing being some sort of hybrid similar to Wii U, only more portable, I think that rules out a full blown Tablet at this point?

I am thinking that this could be the system that really makes or breaks it for Nintendo. If they can somehow pull off a major system seller out the gates and pick up, and keep, strong third party support without sacrificing gameplay to some wonky control scheme only the most devoted fans will put up with, this machine could be their true return to glory.

I shouldn't be optimistic because history has taught me to be skeptical of everything Nintendo does, but I don't know with a new President and PS4 proving consoles are not dead, even in Japan, I think that suggests they just might have learned their lesson this time.

I still expect them to be light on the multimedia features as there is just no way they are going to change positions on that now, but at this point I don't think those are a real issue anymore so long as Hulu and Netflix work as expected I think that should be enough for the masses.
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Offline Spak-Spang

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I agree that this home console system is really going to be the testing point for Nintendo as a hardware console maker. 

The portable gaming market is fluctuating and mobile gaming is changing...even if people think hand phone gaming is worse than portable it is easier to carry one device.  So that is what people will do. 

So now console gaming is more important to Nintendo, but they have been losing popularity in consoles since the Nintendo 64.  The Wii was a fluke, and even then towards the end of the life cycle it wasn't performing as well.

Nintendo needs to get lucky again this next generation...because right now Nintendo looks only successful in handhelds.  A hybrid might help, but honestly, I think Nintendo needs more.  Personally, I think I would double or triple down on the motion controls and get them perfect. 

Offline Spak-Spang

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I think my idea would be to try to make a motion controller that can do 90% of what a regular controller can do, so that the default controller can be the only controller you need.  That means you need near flawless motion control.

I think combining the Wii motion technology using the infrared lights and camera positioning but using the Wii using the sensor bar and the Wii mote as both camera and infrared projector could give better motion control calculations...you might need a dedicated chip to that but add to that two gyro sensors for best tilt tracking and put all the same technology in the new wireless nunchuk that comes WITH the controller not an add on and you have a good start.

Next move the D-Pad down to where the 1 and 2 buttons are, and put 4 buttons near the top how you hold them and have the A and X button be bean shaped curved towards the Y and B buttons to help feel the buttons is a good start.  Still have the trigger underneath, but add another trigger 2 triggers accessible only when holding the controller in the NES classic Controller setup, and now you have a Wiimote that has motion controls for pointing and mouse controls (the 2nd analog stick) 5 easily accessible buttons for one hand.  An analog nunchuk for movement and 2 more buttons...and a fully operational SNES controller.  The only thing it can't do well is N64 controls. 

This is what the Wii U should have been from the start but with comparable hardware to the Xbox One. 

I agree that this home console system is really going to be the testing point for Nintendo as a hardware console maker. 

The portable gaming market is fluctuating and mobile gaming is changing...even if people think hand phone gaming is worse than portable it is easier to carry one device.  So that is what people will do. 

So now console gaming is more important to Nintendo, but they have been losing popularity in consoles since the Nintendo 64.  The Wii was a fluke, and even then towards the end of the life cycle it wasn't performing as well.

Nintendo needs to get lucky again this next generation...because right now Nintendo looks only successful in handhelds.  A hybrid might help, but honestly, I think Nintendo needs more.  Personally, I think I would double or triple down on the motion controls and get them perfect.

Everything but your last sentence I agree with but I think they need to just ABANDON motion controls altogether unless they are seriously considering entering VR which is not likely.

There was a time when Nintendo was known for working with cutting edge technology firms to bring home the best technology to their products, that time has long gone now is the time to get that reputation back.
Software alone will not save them, they need to get every single partner they can muster on board and they need to prove they are willing to bend over backwards to make everyone happy and take a loss for the first year to get this thing off the ground. With Wii U they stubbornly refused to make any sacrifices to profit for the long term and instead they lost money anyways because sales tanked.

With Steam and Oculus entering the fold hard core gamers are going to be more impressed by technology than ever before, you cut corners in this day and age you might as well throw in the towel and join Sega in nobodygivesashit land.
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Offline Spak-Spang

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Nintendo has NEVER been about cutting edge technology.  In fact no console maker except maybe Sony and the Cell Processor has been about delivering cutting edge technology. 

My point is, Nintendo can't or isn't willing to risk the costs associated with higher end technology...selling consoles below cost to keep it in a reasonable price range.  Spending budgets the size of mid-range summer blockbuster movies or more is very risky for Nintendo, and Nintendo doesn't have secondary divisions to help balance those types of losses. 

So Nintendo looks for gimmicks to differentiate themselves from the competition.  And the Wii was the ONLY system that had workable motion controls...they were not perfect, but they were workable, and the general public would assume Nintendo was the motion control specialists.  They should have followed up the Wii with the next step of motion control.  Turn the Wii U into the SNES of motion controls.  The SNES was the next evolutionary step in 2D gaming.  We needed that advancement for motion controls, because as Ian Sane would point out, motion controls were not perfectly satisfying yet.  But for many they were incredibly engaging.

Now imagine the money spent on the tablet like controller going into research and development of better motion controls and then launching the Wii U at around the same price, but having better hardware...launching I think you can see how the Wii U could have been something more approachable and even 3rd parties would have already known how to adjust for the difference between Nintendo and other platforms.


Offline Ian Sane

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I think people tend to forget how cutting edge the NES was.  Their goal was to make something that could run Donkey Kong nearly arcade perfect.  The Famicom came out in 1983 and compare that to the Colecovision which came out only a year earlier.  The Famicom also came out the same day as the Sega SG-1000 and ran circles around it.  It was very impressive stuff for the time.

I think motion control is a fool's errand because I think what people want, and Sony appears to have known this more than anyone, is a good flexible videogame system that is actually kind of generic in its features and abilities.  Nintendo offered something like this with the NES and SNES and those are the two consoles where they were the most commercially and culturally relevant videogame company in the world.  Those consoles did what people expected and were broad enough in their functionality that a wide variety of games and genres were present.  Since then Nintendo always has some trade-off.  Some piece of core functionality that the market expects that is cast aside in favour of Nintendo's own weird way of doing things.

N64 - no you don't get FMW or CD quality audio or lower game prices but you do get fast load times
GC - no you don't get online gaming but you do get GBA connectivity
Wii - no you don't get industry standard specifications but you do get motion control
Wii U - no you don't get industry standard specifications again but you do get a tablet controller

It is funny that Nintendo has stuck with this "compromise this to get this" routine for four console generations when it has only worked ONCE while the two consoles they had that didn't do that were hugely successful.  Meanwhile Sony has had four consoles and three of them were the industry leader simply by being incredibly conventional.  The PS3 was their one misstep and that was because they went away from their proven strategy, going with a high end luxury price product instead of something that fit the conventions of the industry.  I don't even know where Nintendo got the idea that being unnecessarily weird was somehow the key to success.  The N64 was largely seen as a misstep and you figure that when it came time to decide if the Cube goes online or doesn't that they would think "failing to follow the conventions of the market really bit us in the ass on the N64 so let's avoid making that mistake again" and instead it was "yeah, being weird for no reason and denying consumers options is the way to go even though the only previous time we did that we surrendered our market share to a non-videogame company that was a newcomer to the market."  A smart company would learn from their mistakes but Nintendo has operated like an insane person since the Virtual Boy.

So focusing on motion controls or other weird gimmicks is going to do jack **** for Nintendo because the only time it ever worked for ANYBODY was the Wii and that appears to be a one time fluke that really only lasted for the first 2/3 of the Wii's life (Wii mania was clearly over the last two years before the Wii U came out).  The market leading console of every other generation has been a very conventional product that has the flexibility to provide lots of games of different styles from different developers.  Because ultimately that's what people want - games.

If Nintendo can include such gimmicks in a console that is also conventional and it somehow doesn't make the price too high then why not do it?  But I don't think that's feasible.  Why doesn't Nintendo just try something conventional?  They haven't put in a real effort to do so in 20 years and yet it makes no sense why when the opposite approach has blown up in their face most of the time.  The only justification I can think of is that their handheld line has been very successful by not being conventional and they've made the mistaken assumption that that same formula applies to consoles, which is still weird because it completely ignores the NES and SNES.

I have read articles from the time how Nintendo was doing things inside N64 that super computers at the time were not doing. Nintendo partnered with some top technology firms to make sure the N64 was in fact cutting edge, they did the same with SNES in fact they worked with SONY to develop a very high end sound chip for the SNES and compared to Genesis the specs of the SNES were pretty damn good. Nintendo compromised on one issue with SNES and that was censoring games, which bit them in the ass and they shed that, sort of, with N64.

Motion controls were a fluke I don't think perfecting those is going to bring people back, I would rather they pretend Wii never even happened and just moved on. What I can say is people who worship Wii forget that the casual market was into Wii Sports and Wii Fit, they didn't care that waggle worked in Mario because casuals had been playing NES Mario for decades and the casuals flocked to the VC. Nobody outside of grandmas and die hard fans were into motion controls. They worked for a very small handful of niche games and ruined all the traditional games.

The biggest problem with Nintendo is they fix one problem they created only to create new ones each generation. IF Wii had at least been graphically on par with 360 *or* still GC level tech but HD capable, they might have at least been able to get a few more games out of 3rd parties who didn't want to sacrifice quality to port their game down to fit Wii's platform. If you take into account how much it sold despite the 3rd party support and lack of features, imagine how much better it would have been if motion controls really were the selling point and it also had at least comparable specs if not cutting edge.
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Offline Spak-Spang

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The question is can Nintendo compete in this market.


Before Nintendo was top dog and they were able to manage to make a good system that could still be sold for a profit...now you can't do that.  You are hoping that the profits come from software and that a couple of years losses will benefit the company in the end. 


Well if you look at the Xbox division they have been struggling to make profits and money hatting exclusives has only made it worse.  Nintendo can't bleed money like that...because right now they are pretty much only one division video games.  Sony and Microsoft are much more and they have diversified business models.


Motion Controls were a fluke, but they introduced the world to a new means of playing games...and some games WERE better with motion controls.  Some sports games, many first person shooters, Some great puzzle and adventure games. 


I think in this market of 3 console makers one is always going to be the loser, and Nintendo has been the loser 4 generations in a row.  The Wii sold many units but the long run they were losers...because of software perception and consumers not buying more games. 


However, many of the party games and group games for casuals sold because there was a market for that kind of game...just gamers knew that the better experience for traditional games was on the other system.


What I am suggesting is perfecting the motion controls and differentiating yourself so that you can have great experiences you can't have on another system.  But not compromising on anything else.  Nintendo could have spent R&D not on a tablet but perfecting the online experience and infrastructure.  Nintendo could have saved money and given the user a more powerful console for the price, but didn't. 


Personally, I really liked the motion controls and I know other people did as well...but it could have been implemented better and that is all I wanted to see.


Offline BranDonk Kong

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N64 - no you don't get FMW or CD quality audio or lower game prices but you do get fast load times
It was the exception to the rule, but Resident Evil 2 for N64 had full motion video. So did Jeopardy, Pokemon Puzzle League, Gex 3, Wheel of Fortune, and a few others. Sure, there wasn't a LOT of FMV on any of those games (actually RE2 had a pretty long intro), due to lack of storage space, but it at least was possible. Not worth the investment in larger cartridges though.
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Offline MagicCow64

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Also, FMV was and is gross. I'm glad it's gone, and that the 64 was not blighted by it for the most part. Also many games, such as Mario 64, would not have been possible due to CD streaming limitations at the time.

Also, FMV was and is gross. I'm glad it's gone, and that the 64 was not blighted by it for the most part. Also many games, such as Mario 64, would not have been possible due to CD streaming limitations at the time.


I am not at all convinced this is true, Mario 64 had TINY levels compared to some games on Playstation, I think it would have been possible look at N64 games that were on Playstation for clues, also the above mentioned Resident Evil, FF7, etc.
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Offline Ian Sane

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The question is can Nintendo compete in this market.

Before Nintendo was top dog and they were able to manage to make a good system that could still be sold for a profit...now you can't do that.  You are hoping that the profits come from software and that a couple of years losses will benefit the company in the end. 

Well if you look at the Xbox division they have been struggling to make profits and money hatting exclusives has only made it worse.  Nintendo can't bleed money like that...because right now they are pretty much only one division video games.  Sony and Microsoft are much more and they have diversified business models.

Well the Wii U model isn't working out so hot.  If the NX is like the Wii U where it compromises a bunch of stuff to be different then it is going to sell worse.  A console experience like the Wii U where almost every game being made is available for every console except it and the only worthwhile games are made by Nintendo themselves and months go by with nothing being released doesn't increase the customer-base, it shrinks it.  Aside from the spike of the Wii, which only spiked because it found a new audience, each Nintendo console sells less than the one before and that makes sense.  People buy the console, are disappointed by all of it's problems, and lose faith in Nintendo and switch brands.

More than anything else my disappointment with the Wii is the reason I didn't buy a Wii U.  Nintendo needed to show me that things would be different this time and they didn't.  Once I found out the specs were compromised for a weird controller yet again I knew all the third party issues I had with the Wii would continue and I was right, and I was already pretty fed up with that issue on the N64 and Cube.  So if the NX is some another Nintendo weird console then everyone who owns a Wii U and is pissed off that there are so few games for it and that Nintendo has done very little with the Gamepad is going to think "oh that's another Wii U.  I'm not buying that" and the console sells even worse.  And of course all those you wrote off Nintendo in prior generations are going to continue to not buy the console because the Wii U retained the problems of the Wii which retained the problems of the Gamecube which retained the problems of the N64.  Nothing ever is fixed and new problems get introduced and become part of the "formula".

So how long does this approach with the ever shrinking userbase and increased customer dissatisfaction and bad reputation and poor word-of-mouth keep working?  A couple years ago were they not shitting bricks about the poor Wii U sales?