to be fair there is still a decent number of people who haven't moved to HD.

Coming off the Gamecube, Nintendo wasn't really in a position to make the Wii an HD console.  Yeah looking back now it would have worked but it was a whole different world back in 2005.

...and my opinion of Miyamoto just shot back up about a thousand points.  I really lost respect for him during the Wii years but this helps a lot.

Of course everyone was telling Nintendo that HDTVs were already becoming the standard when the Wii launched.  This is sort of Nintendo admitting they were wrong and I like that.  "2 or 3 years" is a stretch.  HDTVs became the standard within six months of the Wii's launch.

Sorry, but I'm not buying this revisionist history now, not after all those years of Nintendo denying that HD mattered.  This sounds more like Miyamoto (and, by extension, Nintendo) trying to not admit that they were wrong about HD adoption.

Some of the more rapid uptake probably also had to do with the US digital TV transition and availability of prerecorded HD content. When all you could get was 1-2 hrs a day over the air, it was a tough sell.

Apparently everyone thinks the HDTV adoption rate was super high in 2006. They weren't STANDARD until around 2007 or later.

Yeah my family only got one because our SD crapped out at the right time. there are still people who don't have an HD TV to this very day.

Well, I'm glad that one year was worth sacrificing any software future the Wii had after its 3rd year.

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17r2gu247fqe3jpg/original.jpg

Dude, that was PR 101. If a company is trying to sell an idea, they're not going to tell you the opposite. For example, "It's not delivery. It's DiGiorno!" Have you ever had DiGiorno? It goddamn tastes like DiGiorno and no one is mixing that up with delivery. No one. Ever.

I have to think that Xbox 360 and PS3 being HD consoles had to help push adoption rates as well.  In other words, MS/Sony made the market come to them rather than taking Nintendo's "wait and see" approach.


I think this shows how Nintendo really is a pretty insular company. They believe what they believe about the market, and would probably never look outside their doors for guidance (consultants, etc.).

Sony was one of the groups pushing for HD, of course they would support it in the PS3. Microsoft likely assumed this to be the case and pushed it on the 360 for that same reason.

I really don't think that the PS3/360 had much impact on HD-TV sales,

Microsoft heavily pushed HD being the future, so much that they & their partners were particularly dickish about it at the 360 launch ("You can't read the text in Dead Rising? Then go buy an HD TV!").  Sony, meanwhile, was heavily pushing BluRay as the new standard for home video through the the PS3, which in turn pushed the adoption of HD TVs to play said BluRays.  While the impact on HD TV adoption can't really be measured, I think it's fair to say they had more than a little bit of a hand in pushing HD TV adoption.

Sorry Broodwars, Adrock is right on this one.  Them admitting midway through the Wii's life cycle that they should have made it HD would contradict with their messaging they made from day 1, AND basically admitting that Sony & Microsoft's offerings were more attractive than what Nintendo was providing.


I know you've been riding the Nintendo hate train for a while, but couldn't it possibly be that Miyamoto was reflecting on the Wii and made a candid remark about what they should have done last generation?

Making the most money in the last generation and losing 2nd place to Microsoft by a few million consoles meant they couldn't make an HD console and couldn't compete in the marketplace?


I get the Wii was successful because of motion controls, but it would have been snapped up with motion controls and HD at $350/unit.  The PS3 started at $600 and at one point you could buy a PS3 for $300 when the Wii was still $250 and the Wii was owning the PS3 in sales.  It certainly could have started at $350 and been a success.  I've heard part of the reason the 3DS was so overpriced at launch was because they thought they left money on the table by pricing the Wii so low. 

This was more than simple PR, though. Nintendo was outright hostile to HD during the Wii era, practically calling it the death of the industry.  To use that Digiorno analogy, Nintendo was not only saying that Digiorno was just as good as Delivery, but that Delivery pizza causes heart attacks in anyone who eats it.  That's why the revisionist history is particularly funny.  This is the company that said that "no one will be able to tell the difference between SD and HD, anyway!"

They had a vested interest in asserting that HD wasn't a big deal.  What I will say is that the video game industry, not just Nintendo, are terrible at managing their messaging.  I've worked in a few different industries, and none of them regularly release such childish & unapologetically hyperbolic statements to make a point in an argument. 


I don't think your complaint is a Nintendo problem.  I think it's a video game industry problem.

NES - 62 million

SNES - 49 million

N64 - 33 million

Gamecube - 22 million


This is why after the Gamecube back in 2005, Nintendo couldn't afford to make an HD system.  Yeah they still made some profit off the Gamecube but the overwelming majority of their money that gen came from the GBA.  After a clear drop in every home console they released since the NES, there was a clear concern Nintendo's home console market would soon be dead.  That's why they decided to change things up with the Wii but made the system weaker so if it failed it wouldn't damage the bank.

Once again, nobody had any idea how popular the Wii would become.  Do you not remember all the conversations in 2005 after the Wiimote was first revealed how risky everyone thought it was?  Even Nintendo was shocked by its success which is why Wii were so hard to find its early months because they had no idea demand would be so high.  Had the system been comparable to the 360/PS3 in power and sold less then the Gamecube, it would have cost Nintendo billions.  Making the system a modified Gamecube like they did wouldn't have seriously hurt the company if it failed since it was much cheaper to produce.

It's easy to say now how Nintendo could have made a more powerful console but nobody could have predicted its success back in 2005.

I think the other consoles pushed the adoption rate for HDTVs. The PS3 was, for a long time, the cheap blu-ray player. Blu-ray is only worthwhile if you have an HDTV. THe thing that pushed the adoption rate was content and Sony brought that two fold with the PS3, even if it was initially scarce and then not particularly wanted. The transition was going to happen eventually, but content is what drove it.

I think I bought my first HDTV in fall 2007. The prices on decent sizes and performance started hitting the sweet spot around then. A year before, and people were still buying tube televisions.

Around that time was also the boom of "flat pannel" (compare to "flat screen").

The Xbox 1 sold 24 million which isn't much more than the Gamecube and they went all in on the HD era and did extremely well.


I think my problem with your analysis is we've gone round and round with why Nintendo has been unsuccessful.  I've often maintained that third parties and lack of standard features (online, optical, etc) are the reason that Nintendo loses Marketshare, not some cost that is too high of a price.  In fact, Gamecube era is really the start of Nintendo's cheaper is better approach to the market (coming at $200, when the competitors were at $300) and it did nothing for Nintendo from a market prospective except convince the market that the Gamecube hardware must in fact be inferior. 


I know that Gamecube was > in power than a PS2, but I was in college then and it was amazing the perception that it was in fact less powerful than a PS2. 


The Wii was more successful than most imagined, but it was largely due to a gimmick or at least unique feature in motion controls.  The problem with selling because you're innovative is that you have to constantly innovate and nobody knows for sure what is going to catch the market.  Wii U was an attempt to innovate (touchscreen) and it has failed to capture the market the way the Wii has.  The fall back then is what Nintendo has always done well.  Create good first party games.  But this has become less of an emphasis for Nintendo because they (since the Wii) have been used to selling a console based on features rather than games.


Nintendo is in the same market as Sony/Microsoft despite them pretending they are not.  They should have matched the standard market feature of HD.  It hurt Nintendo doubly because now they have to rely on first party games and they are having the HD growing pains that developers had 8 years ago and are having a hard time bringing games to market. 


Every reason you listed would have been a reason to keep HD out of the Wii U.  Much like the Wii, nobody knew if the console would capture the market, it hasn't yet.  Nintendo needs to focus on the market and what the market needs and that will take care of the declining marketshare.  Unfortunately Nintendo likes to think they are a market of themselves and that people will buy them in spite of their decisions. 

Frankly I can see why Miyamoto would want HD and I can see why he thinks something like 4K would really only benefit Pikmin in the games he made.

Time to Market.  Pure and simple.  Once Nintendo choose to go with the Wiimote as the basis of the console they then had to decide on the hardware to back it up.  They made the decision that going HD plus Motion controls would have been to much.  Seeing how the WiiU has been a struggle I think they made the right call.

Unfortunately Nintendo's big problem was they didn't give the Wii the short lifecycle it probably deserved.  Wii HD should have been out about halfway through the wii lifecycle to maintain moment.

Time to market shouldn't have changed.  Teams should have gotten bigger to allow them to make a game in the same amount of time as the last generation.  Every generation games get bigger and more graphically inclined.


Wii HD mid-life may have staved off the massive decline at the end of the Wii generation.  But that's a risky strategy too.  You risk being a Dreamcast, or an in-between console.  People generally want to get at least 5 years out of a console before they are ready to move on.  Then when they are ready, they want to see what Sony/Microsoft bring to the table before they make a decision.  Then the Wii HD would be massively underpowered compared to PS4/Xbox One unless you mean that Nintendo should move to a 3-4 year hardware timeline and still have come out with the Wii U to compete against the PS4/Xbox One.  Plus, I know there is not a Wii Sports HD on the Wii U, but I just don't see people rebuying Wii HD to play Wii Sports again in HD.  The Wii was big because of motion controls, a re-release in HD wouldn't have been innovative and I think would have just been an earlier less powerful, gamepad lacking Wii U.  How would that have driven market support? 

Nintendo doesn't sell the world's largest computer OS or office productivity suite at insane margins.

Also, Microsoft lost a ridiculous amount of money on the original Xbox. And they knew that going in. They were fine with losing money for a while in order to gain a foothold in the market. In contrast, intentionally doing something you know will cause you to lose money is the last thing Nintendo would ever do.

People here are also failing to remember that Microsoft is a large, large corporation with products in all sorts of different categories.  They have deep pockets to be able to take a loss on Xbox to not only increase market share for the next generation, but also use Xbox as a platform to integrate with their other services.


Nintendo is a video games company, plain and simple.

The xbox 360 was profitable.  They weren't planning on subsidizing the product forever. 


Nintendo maintains more than $10 billion cash on hand.  Let's not try to pretend they are a mom and pop store competing against the big boys.  It's a 65 billion dollar industry that through the NES/SNES Nintendo had a big hand in building. 


Nintendo has the hugely profitable handheld hardware and software markets to offset their home console development.


If they don't want to put into effort to make hardware that the market wants or spend money to build a market then maybe they should go third party.  Nobody said they have to make hardware.  Their low hardware sales will limit their sales of first party software and the way it's going will likely not make them a profit. 

Also, I'm not saying do it exactly like Microsoft.  The xbox wasn't HD which is what we were talking about.  Microsoft decided to subsidize third parties to a large extent while they built up a solid market share and built up a strong 1st party library.  Nintendo already maintained a large portion of the market and had some third party relations and wouldn't have needed to go about it the same way.


But this is an example of a long term strategy vs. a short term strategy.  Microsoft went into the market to make money no doubt about it.  They knew the xbox would hemorrhage, but the 360 was profitable and the Xbox One should be as well.  They aren't going to be in another XBox 1 loss position.  Vs. Nintendo which is focused on annually showing a profit so they never extend themselves.  But as they do they they miss opportunities in the market and the market continues to move away from their products.  When I see the declining sales generation over generation that makes think they are ignoring the market demands, not that they need to cut costs to the bone in case things keep getting worse.  They are in a downward market cycle and cutting costs isn't going to get them out of it. 

Sorry, one last thought.  I'd edit it into a previous reply if possible.


The new argument seems to be that because of size Microsoft and Sony can do things that Nintendo can't leading Nintendo to develop inferior hardware.  Does everyone really believe that Nintendo can't compete with Microsoft and Sony?


Very rarely does size alone mean a company can win a market.  Companies that win do because they develop the best product for the market.  This is a combination of things, never one thing they could do different. 

Between the lack of HD and the single gyro, I think leaving out the single gyro was the bigger mistake. If the motion controls had worked as well as the motion plus out of the box, I think we'd be looking at a different picture now.

If Nintendo had any idea how huge the Wii would be they'd have upped the specs and put Motion+ in the box and charged $100 more for it, which, it seems pretty clear from how things played out, people would have paid. But that's like saying if they knew what they know now Microsoft would have used a different soldering technique; it's easy to say now.

You have to remember this is the ONLY thing Nintendo does at any meaningful level.  You can't say that for Microsoft and Sony.  Its one thing when a DIVISION isn't profitable its a whole other thing when a COMPANY isn't profitable.  So yes because of the diversification of Sony and Microsoft they can assume more risk in ONE division over another.

4 years in for a Wii HD 2010 that would get them to PS360 level but just that.  Then 2014-15 Wii U after seeing Sony and MS's hand.  They would have righted them to the generations at that point.

In order to have had a Wii HD ready for 2010, Nintendo would have had to start serious development back in 2008.  2008 was when the Wii had its record sales where it was selling over a million systems every month worldwide on non-holiday months.  Hell in 2009 the system still ended up putting huge numbers that put most previous systems to shame as well. 

No company making the money Nintendo was would have cut the systems life that short at the time.  If they knew Wii sales would crash like they did in 2011 then they might have, but once again nobody back in 2008/2009 knew that would happen.

Oh jeez, and I thought it was weird when Miyamoto started taking credit for Virtual Boy...

I am glad the Wii was not HD as I only got an HD TV this year.  :-P

A console has a typical shelf life of five years.  So maybe HD wasn't the standard in 2006.  Maybe it wasn't going to be in 2007.  But did Nintendo honestly think that by 2009 or 2010 that that was still going to be the case?  They weren't making a product that was going to be replaced by the time HD became standard.  It was a five year product only future-proofed for two years at best.  Hell, I was pissed about their attitude towards online gaming on the Cube for the same reason.  In 2003 they told us that not enough people were online but I didn't know ANYONE at the time that wasn't and clearly the internet was the future and that by 2006 when a Cube successor was due an offline console was going to look extremely archaic.

A console is not a product of its time.  Some sort of educated guess has to be made of where things are going within the next five years.  Nintendo still hasn't learned that, releasing a console seemingly designed to match up against the PS3 and Xbox 360 a mere year before those consoles get replaced.

Ironically when they launched the Famicom, it was the most advanced console hardware ever at that point while Sega released a product of it time, the SG-1000, which was about on par with a Colecovision and got creamed.  Nintendo were the ones with the future-proof console thinking beyond the exact time the product was released.  They KNEW how to do this at one point and then seemingly unlearned it over time.

I didn't have an HDTV at the time the Wii came out and only got one last year.  My beef was largely with the inferior hardware that I figured would screw up ports between consoles which is EXACTLY what happened.  It's funny to think of Nintendo not knowing the Wii would be such a runaway success because I cannot think of any other way that it would have succeeded.  It grossly overachieved for the product it was.  Take away the mainstream fad element of it and you get... the Wii U.  If it didn't catch on as a big fad with the mainstream how was a glorified last gen console with slippery imprecise controls and embarassingly poor third party support going to go anywhere?  I see it either catching on in a big way with the mainstream or bombing huge.  Going for the mainstream was always the goal, Nintendo was not caught off guard by that.

Because they could afford to do it back then.  The industry was much cheaper to create hardware and software and can not be compared at all to the modern industry.  Something like the Famicom that was the most advanced system in the early 80's didn't cost billions to create and wouldn't sink the company if it failed.  Once again, Microsoft and Sony changed the game by being willing to lose billions to create super consoles.  Both companies lost billions on the 360/PS3 in their early years and their gaming divisions have yet to make any of that money back, despite having much better sales and making money the last several years.  Nintendo only profits off videogames and so losing billions on the Wii like Microsoft and Sony did with the 360/PS3 was not an option since they don't have other non-gaming divisions making money to fall back on.

What I wonder is why Nintendo didn't even allow for higher resolutions on the Wii. The Xbox has some 720p and 1080i games, and even the PS2 has a handful of 1080i games, so the Wii should be able to handle those two options under certain conditions.

But alot of the gaming industry was saying that they made a mistake then and I remember being really disappointed at the time.  Microsoft had a manufacturing defect, they didn't chose to offer faulty hardware.  Yes, they deserve alot of blame for that debacle, but it's much different than what Nintendo did.  Nintendo chose to offer inferior hardware.  The funny thing is the Gamecube should have shown them that the market wanted technical specs since they brought the Gamecube in $100 cheaper than the competition and it didn't make the Gamecube a good seller.  I remember Nintendo being lambasted at the time for lack of HD and that was assuming fewer sales.  Much different than a hindsight is 20/20 situation. 

They kind of did according to this article.. Basically, it contends that Microsoft knew about the high defect rate (mainly due to continually adding features after the hardware was locked down), but opted to launch anyway to beat Sony (and to a lesser extent, Nintendo) to market which, quite honestly, is pretty crummy of them. Sure, Microsoft's intent wasn't to launch broken hardware, but it's pretty dishonest to launch broken hardware knowing it's broken.

I'm not sure what your point is with the GameCube analogy as it was technically on par with the Xbox and way ahead of the PS2. By your logic, that should have shown Nintendo that competing in terms of hardware power wasn't the way to win.

Nintendo chose to use weaker specs because the Wii was one hell of a gamble. Nintendo has always been very conservative as a company and they were going out on a limb with the Wii. What I'm saying is if they knew the Wii would be the insane success it was they could have played things a bit less safe and beefed up the hardware and improved the motion technology and held onto more of the gamer market.

My point with the Gamecube is price doesn't have much of an impact on the video game market.  Consumers either see the benefit of your product and want it or they don't. 


There are some extremes, like Sony pushing the PS3 out at $600 a full $200 higher than the xbox, but otherwise, $100 savings wasn't enough to convince consumers to pick up a Gamecube. 


While it was technically on the same level as Xbox/PS2, the perception was that it was a weaker console.  Instead of seeing that as a problem, Nintendo seemed to embrace the idea of a weaker console.  It was also weaker in online capability and disc capacity.  While those two items didn't lead to the failure of the Gamecube they continued the perception that it was not a fully featured console. 


I don't think the Wii was that big of a gamble.  Not many people thought it would sell 100 million, but Nintendo prices their consoles to make $ day one and Nintendo is often the leading publisher so there was always some minimum number of units it was going to sell.  Gamecube made Nintendo a profit and despite the Wii U looking like another Gamecube, very few people actually think Nintendo will lose money on it.  The industry didn't understand the Wii at first, but people that played Wii Sports got it immediately. 


I just don't get how skimping standard features will ever be a benefit to Nintendo.  Price the console to make a profit and give the market what it wants.  Then if you sell 20 million or 100 million you'll be okay. 

Actually, GameCube had the same online capability as PS2 (minus the external hard drive). It's just that developers pretty much chose not to do online for GameCube.

I don't think Nintendo needed to cheap out as much as they had with the Wii. Considering the GameCube was being sold at profit with the $99.99 pricepoint, they definitely could have beefed up the Wii at $249.99. That said, there's no way they could have matched the PS3 or even the Xbox 360. If 2006 Nintendo took a few billion-dollar loss like those companies did, it'd sink the company.

Nintendo never created an online game for it.  Actually, I believe Phantasy Star was the only US title to use online.  You can argue they are equal and from a technical standpoint you may be right, but you can't expect the market to find the experiences equal since other consoles made a point to use the features and Nintendo did not.  It would be like arguing because the Wii had online multiplayer that it was on-par with Xbox live and free. 

I never said they needed to match, just needed to be in the same ballpark.  Nintendo is the third largest company in Japan sitting on over $10 B in cash.  It wouldn't have been preferable to lose $3 B, but it certainly wouldn't sink the company.  Also, they didn't have to sell the console at a loss like Sony/Microsoft did, or subsidize blu ray (PS3), or have massive RROD issues (360) pulling those consoles into the red. 

In australia all tv's have to be hd or you cannot watch tv :'( as all tv stations have moved to digital!

Also we should get Miyamoto to join NWR that would attract a lot more users!

Don't they have converter boxes like they do in the United States?

Pnly for old tv's ;)

Stupid spellcheck: Only for old tv's

Converter boxes should work on any TV, at least here they do. Even on new HDTVs

what i was meant to say was new tv's have it built in!