Topic: Revolution Specs to Never be Revealed?

[WindyMan]

If Nintendo gets their way, the official spec sheet for the Revolution may never be made public.

Eurogamer.net is reporting that in an interview with Dutch game magazine [N]Gamer, Nintendo of Europe's marketing director Jim Merrick says that Nintendo may decide to not reveal detailed Revolution hardware specifications to the public.    

The reasoning behind this, according to Merrick, is that information such as clock speed and polygon count is ultimately "irrelevant" to the consumer, and has little or no affect to how much some will like a system or its games after the console is released.  When further questioned on the subject, Nintendo's official position on it is they "don't want to contribute to the cloud of meaningless information that surrounds the next generation systems."    

One thing's for sure, we probably won't be getting the real meaningful information about Revolution until next year, when playable games are shown.  Nintendo has promised to tell the world a little bit more about their next-gen console before this year ends, and whatever that information may be, it most certainly won't be a hardware spec sheet.

[Mario]

Brilliant!

Now nobody can say things like "i'm not buying a Revolution because it only does 161.84 revatons per gigaflop and the PS3 does 180".

[Kairon]

If Nintendo can show games of similar quality before this whole "withholding technical specs" thing gets into the general public, then they can convince the average consumer that, hey, the Rev IS as advanced as the 360 and PS3...

Not likely though, lol. Either we'll get a leak or someone will tear apart a Rev launch unit and ppost on the internet what it all is.

Either way, Nintendo is doing all it can to avoid confronting supergiants Sony and Microsoft in a purely technical spec war. That includes this hope not to release specs, but also their decision not to show games unless they have real, actual, concrete gameplay to blow away your mind so you don't care about lens flares in screenshots.

~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com

[odifiend]

I agree completely with Nintendo's stance.  Brilliant might be going to far, but it is true, the average gamer can't make heads or tails of specs.  Still power whores will be power whores... Insinuations will be made from Iwata's previous comments and the absence of spec sheets.

"NO #s??? It must sux @ss!"  

[Berto2K]

even if they never officially announce it, someone will take it apart and figure it out.

[Nephilim]

comparison will be made when the first game pic is released
so it doesnt matter

[WindyMan]

Quote
Originally posted by: DeadlyD
comparison will be made when the first game pic is released
so it doesnt matter

That's why Nintendo isn't going to show off anything until it's playable.  Those screenshots will be accompanied by videos and impressions, to which comparisions will also need to be made.

I should say that yes, specs will eventually get out, but not from Nintendo if they hold true to their word.  The GameCube's spec sheet is readily available on Nintendo.com, as are the PS2's and Xbox's on their respective websites.  If Nintendo doesn't post the specs, then people can't use that as a comparison point and will have to look at stuff like game library and console features, which is what Nintendo is going for.

[King of Twitch]

So does this mean every dev from now on will sign an NDA?

[ruby_onix]

"So, how's the Rev stack up to the XBox2 and PS3 in terms of graphics?"

"It's not as good."

"Well yeah, I already knew that. But HOW not good is it?"

"Nintendo doesn't even wanna talk about it."

"That bad, huh?"

[Mario]

"Here, have a look"

"I do not have eyes!"

I can play that game too...

*Man meets beautiful woman*

<Man> You seem quite pretty
<Woman> Thank you!
<Man> But I am not convinced!
<Woman> You.. what?
<Man> I need your specs baby!
<Woman> Uh... my what?
<Man> Specifications! I do not believe what I am seeing!
<Woman> Oh you!
<Man> No, really.
<Woman> Uh...
<Man> I MUST KNOW! You could really be ugly!
<Woman> But you just said I looked..-
<Man> GIVE ME AN ANSWER WOMAN!
<Woman> ...
<Man> Where are you going??

[KnowsNothing]

*Man whips out remote and controls Woman with it*

<Man> Woah hay, this is incredible, I can control women with this, this is the best remote ever.  Come here baby!
<Woman> AAAAUUUUGGGGHHHH

[ruby_onix]

Quote
"Here, have a look"

Sorry, that won't happen until "a while into 2006", and that's assuming that one look will have the desired effect. Get ready for Nintendo's mainstream image to take a major beating up until then, at the earliest.


(BTW, I do think that most/all of the "tech" comparisons on the internet are beyond useless, but running from the fight is going to be even more costly.)

[Bill Aurion]

Not when the average gamer doesn't care...Seriously, stop assuming that every casual gamer out there is a specs-whore...

[ruby_onix]

If the average gamer doesn't care about specs, then what's the harm in releasing them?

Yeah, the company releases specs, a bunch of unqualified couch jockeys try to make sense of the specs, come to some possibly innacurate conclusions that might not have anything to do with the games, and then their worthless opinions trickle down to a bunch of other areas.

But by not releasing any specs, after admitting that they're going to be behind the competion, Nintendo's going to score an automatic "zero" with those unqualified couch jockeys.


Two to three times as powerful as a GameCube...

[joshnickerson]

I have to wonder, when companies do release the specs for hardware, do most people even understand what it means?

"Hey, the PS3 will be able to pull off 453 Megons per second and it will have a max speed of 6.5 gigaflops!"

"And do you understand what that means?"

"No."

[Thrakkerzog]

They should just print insane numbers on the chips to throw people for a loop.  :-)

[mantidor]

Quote
Originally posted by: ruby_onix


But by not releasing any specs, after admitting that they're going to be behind the competion, Nintendo's going to score an automatic "zero" with those unqualified couch jockeys.

Thats the thing, they have never admitted they are going to be behind, they always say "our graphics are going to be comparable to competitors", that "behind" you talk aout its just numbers, and even GC was "behind" in that area.

[NotSoStu]

Meh. The specs will get out sooner or later. I mean, they've already told us the name of the CPU and the GPU (Broadway and Hollywood), so it shows that they are at least going to show off something about the specs.

[ThePerm]

well we better see  some gears of wars....mgs type stuff

[Nile Boogie]

They should just release Super Nintendo specs and call it a day.

I get why some of us want specs, it will give us some sense of how the games are going to look. Many of us are not graphics whores yet we still don't want a system that's vastly underpowered, I know I don't.  I don't think there would be any point to posting specs after the system is released or after some playable games are shown. The only spec I care about this disc-format. I don't believe there has been any conformation on the larger capacity disc.

[couchmonkey]

Well, this does kinda scream, "Not as good as Xbox 360 and PS3!"  The only fathomable reason to hide the specs if Rev is equal to or greater than the competition is because Nintendo wants people to judge the system on it's other merits.  The problem with that is, the hardcore crowd will judge it on technical merits anyway, and as some have said here, hiding them leads everyone to the assumption that it's the weakest...

Umm...back to the point, as usual, it sounds like Revolution will be the weakest.  Which doesn't matter to me that much, but what is driving me up the walls is that I want to know what the games will look like; having specs or a rough power comparison to the other consoles would be the give me an idea, but Nintendo doesn't want me to know how it compares to the others so I sit here aching to see some screenshots.

How will this affect Nintendo's sales?  I don't think it hurts any more than having specs that prove Nintendo is the weakest.  Nintendo plans to sell the system on the merits of the new controls, so as long as the graphics are better than the Xbox, I don't think matters.  Of course, maybe Revolution isn't the weakest of the three.  In that case I think it would probably be better for Nintendo to reveal some specs, although it could still be excluding itself from a big chunk of gamers if the system is better than Xbox 360, but worse than PS3 (assuming PS3 is actually the most powerful).

[Bill Aurion]

I get why some of us want specs, it will give us some sense of how the games are going to look.

The point is it really doesn't...Their true purpose is to allow companies and fanboys to wave their probes around like morons...

[Mario]

You'll see what the games look like before the system launches, that's all that needs to happen.

[nitsu niflheim]

I want games, I don't want specs.  I don't care about graphics, I want games that I can enjoy and not feel like I wasted whatever the hell they are going to cost next gen... 60.00.

[kirby_killer_dedede]

I understood that as "Our system is so inferior that we don't want to show just how inferior it is."

I mean it's not like I'm jumping boat over this but it's stupid...no, ignorant things like this that Nintendo keeps doing thaht keeps them behind.