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The Game Hardware News & Rumors Thread
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Eugene
careful with axes
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Hillsborough, CA
 
2011-09-07, 23:44

Quote:
Originally Posted by bassplayinMacFiend View Post
In other news, if I was still heavily into PC gaming like I was in the 90s I'd definitely take a look at this beast:

http://www.laptopspec.net/wp-content...-Laptop-03.jpg

The Razer Blade, less than an inch thick gaming laptop with i7 2.8GHz and some super duper video card. One of the coolest parts though is the LCD display/trackpad and button setup on the righthand side of the keyboard.
I would instead buy a top of the line PC desktop for $1300, and then use the rest to buy an upgraded 11" MacBook Air.

Even a MacBook Pro 17" is better considering you get two more processor cores while giving up very little in the GPU department.
  quote
dmegatool
Custom User Title
 
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: At home
 
2011-09-09, 07:40

So that's where Nintendo put it's energy, a new DSi XL color.

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/kotaku/vi...w-dsi-xl-color
  quote
Robo
Formerly Roboman, still
awesome
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Portland, OR
 
2011-09-09, 14:19

Quote:
Originally Posted by dmegatool View Post
So that's where Nintendo put it's energy, a new DSi XL color.

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/kotaku/vi...w-dsi-xl-color
You could say what you said about virtually any company. "So that's where Apple puts its energy, a new iPhone 4 color." Apple should have instead had all those paint engineers work on making the Apple TV a more compelling product, amirite?

In the last month, Nintendo has dropped the price of the 3DS, rolled out a totally revamped marketing campaign in all territories, and announced that they had acquired Japan's single most important third party franchise as a 3DS exclusive. Do those things count as Nintendo putting its energy into the 3DS? They're releasing at least one major first party 3DS exclusive per month for the rest of the year, starting today. Does that count as putting energy into the 3DS?

Remember when Nintendo was going to exit the console market after the slow-selling Gamecube? Or when the PSP was going to totally kill the DS, just like the PS1 killed the N64, which would leave Nintendo with absolutely nothing and force them to go third party? Remember that?

Nintendo has been "doomed" since 1889. It's really not unlike how certain analysts still treat Apple's success as a fluke and act like the company is going to head back to the mid-'90s days of 2% market share, which is I guess why it's disappointing to read the same tired Nintendo media narrative here.

Yes, Nintendo had their first-ever quarterly operating loss. Even Steve Jobs's Apple had one quarterly loss, too (Q1 2001). We all know that Apple never recovered from that one.

To be honest, the 3DS price drop was probably the most Jobs-like, or at least Silicon-Valley-like, move that Nintendo has made in memory. Iwata told investors that they dropped the price of the 3DS because it "felt right;" he explained that they didn't drop the price when it felt right with the Gamecube and he felt they paid for that. This sort of intuition and "gut feeling" is valued in Silicon Valley, where the idea is that if you take time to analyze things you'll be too slow to react, but acting on it is almost unheard of in a large Japanese company. Nintendo could have hobbled along without a price drop until the holidays, when Mario Kart and Mario 3D Land and Pokémon and Monster Hunter would have helped the handheld reach critical mass. But they would have risked losing developer support in the meantime. So they instead slashed the price in the middle of the doldrums of summer, to give hardware sales an immediate boost (it worked), boost sales of their existing software (it worked), and send a clear signal that they were willing to do anything to make the 3DS meet their high expectations.

The 3DS often gets compared to the PS3, another overpriced successor to a massively popular system that got a slow start. But in my mind their situations couldn't be more different. Sony seems content to remain in third place, as long as the system is profitable not losing more money. (The ludicrously over-engineered PS3 wiped out all the profits of the dominant PS1 and PS2.) But Nintendo's willing to going for broke. Imagine if, after six months of slow sales, Sony dropped the price of the PS3 to not that of the Xbox 360, but that of the PS2. Sony couldn't do that, because they were losing hundreds of dollars on each PS3 sold, even at $599. But Nintendo can, because they built a high profit margin into the 3DS price. And that's what they did. The 3DS sells for the same price as the DSi or DSi XL, depending on the territory.

The easy media narrative is that nobody was buying 3DSes because dedicated handheld gaming devices are dead, everybody's playing Angry Birds now. But if you look at the actual numbers, that's just not true. In the months before the price drop announcement, the DS was the best-selling system in the US. (In Japan it was the PSP, another dedicated handheld gaming device.) Nintendo's problem wasn't that nobody was buying DSes or 3DSes, it was that people weren't buying 3DSes because they were buying DSes. There could be a dozen reasons why — a lack of willingness to pay more for future potential; perhaps some consumers thought the 3DS was just a DSi revision — and instead of trying to sort them all out, Nintendo took one quick slash at the Gordian knot and cut the price. Now, the theory goes, it doesn't matter if a consumer thinks the 3DS is just a DSi revision, because it's priced like a DSi.

This seems to have worked. And if it doesn't, they'll try something else. This is Nintendo. When they saturated the market for single-game home systems, they released single-game handheld systems. And when they saturated the market for those, they released the first programmable home system that was a worldwide success, even though Atari had just killed that market dead. And in 1989, when the first competition for their home system arrived, they released the first successful programmable handheld system. And in 1998, when Bandai and NeoGeo released (Japan-only) competitors for that, they released a color version. And in 2004, when for the first time a stronger competitor launched a serious rival to their decades-dominant handheld brand, they killed it themselves and made something entirely new. And in 2006, when they were all but forced out of the console business...well, you get the idea.

and i guess i've known it all along / the truth is, you have to be soft to be strong
  quote
Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2011-09-09, 15:06

More rumored bad news for Nintendo from the same guys who originally reported the monstrous 3DS add-on analog stick:

Nintendo Having Serious Problems Getting the Wii U Working?

Quote:
According to 01Net's report, the hardware powering the Wii U simply isn't up to scratch to do what Nintendo needs it to: Namely, run not just the console, but beam data to its fancy touch-screen controller as well. Apparently developers working on the console are having to use "tethers" to ensure serviceable communication between the Wii U and its controller, but even then things still aren't working that well, and progress is reportedly halted daily with repeated software updates for the pad.
The full-screen video on the controller was the one piece of the whole Wii U announcement that my coworkers and I were most skeptical of and technically curious about. It comes as zero surprise to me that Nintendo may be having trouble pulling it off.

The quality of this board depends on the quality of the posts. The only way to guarantee thoughtful, informative discussion is to write thoughtful, informative posts. AppleNova is not a real-time chat forum. You have time to compose messages and edit them before and after posting.
  quote
Robo
Formerly Roboman, still
awesome
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Portland, OR
 
2011-09-09, 16:26

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad View Post
More rumored bad news for Nintendo from the same guys who originally reported the monstrous 3DS add-on analog stick:

Nintendo Having Serious Problems Getting the Wii U Working?

The full-screen video on the controller was the one piece of the whole Wii U announcement that my coworkers and I were most skeptical of and technically curious about. It comes as zero surprise to me that Nintendo may be having trouble pulling it off.
WiDi, AirPlay — that sort of streaming isn't exactly uncharted territory, no? Knowing Nintendo, any problems they're having are caused by trying to engineer around patents, because they're notorious cheapasses with their hardware.

That said, I listed my (many) qualms about 01net as a source on the last page. Not saying that it couldn't be true — problems are certainly not uncommon for development kits of still-in-development hardware — just saying that I'm not convinced it's true just because 01net says it is. (Though since that leak could have come from a third party, and not directly from Nintendo, it's perhaps more plausible.)

I'm quite sure the Wii U is still over a year away from hitting shelves, so it's not like they don't have time to get any issues ironed out.

I'm still a little weirded out by the emphasis on the 3DS frankenpad. Is it ugly? Sure, but I think it's overshadowing the real story, which is the next Monster Hunter being on the 3DS. For people who aren't familiar with the Japanese market: It would be like if Sony announced that the PS3 would be the exclusive home of Modern Warfare 3, and also introduced a monstrously ugly approximation of the 360 controller for people who were used to the 360 to (optionally) play it with, and everybody focused on the awfulness of the new 360-style controller and not, y'know, that Modern Warfare 3 was going to be exclusive to the PS3.

As a 3DS owner, if making that pad was what it took to get Monster Hunter Tri G exclusive to the 3DS, then I'm glad Nintendo did it. Monster Hunter is a huge franchise, and it hitting the 3DS — and hitting the 3DS this year — is only good for the 3DS ecosystem.

There's no indication that Nintendo intends for it to be anything more than a "Classic Controller" for the 3DS. In fact, at this point, a better analogy might be the Wii Balance Board. Sure, the Balance Board isn't technically a controller just for Wii Fit, but come on.

Even Monster Hunter Tri G doesn't require the frankenpad.

and i guess i've known it all along / the truth is, you have to be soft to be strong
  quote
dmegatool
Custom User Title
 
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: At home
 
2011-09-10, 07:41

Yeah the Wii U is still pretty far. But at the same time, with it annonunced, they can't rely on the Wii for too long. Plus, it seems like every third party stopped to care about it. It's not like if it is a big surprise that 2012 won't be a great Wii year...

As for the rumor, they should make it work asap. They need third party to jump on the bandwagon now to get decent titles early when the U comes out.
  quote
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