What I Want from Nintendo's NX

There is plenty of speculation about Nintendo's next home console but perhaps less excitement than there needs to be if it is to take a substantial part of the market.  With the Wii U being neither old nor successful, and with Xbox One and PS4 both still being quite new and seeming like good performers technically, gamers might be wondering what Nintendo can offer.  The Wii U had plenty of charming, good quality Nintendo-published content but that did not help it's sales.

So here is a run-down of some of the important things Nintendo has to do with the hardware to make it outsell Xbox One (not impossible) and take a decent chunk of the home console marked.

Power

The hardware has to match the PS4 for power in order that 3rd party developers have no doubts about the consoles ability to run their games.  It might also instill confidence in consumers that there will be a decent range of games available for the machine, not just excellent but numerically limited Nintendo releases.

Price

The console will have to hit the shelves at no more than £250.  Dedicated gamers have had a lot of gear to pay for recently and might resent being asked to fork out again.  Especially by a developer which is releasing another home console so quickly and is so fond of keeping the prices of its own games so high.  If sales were slow to start with this would dent the confidence of both developers and slower up-take consumers.

Backwards Compatibility

Wii U games will have to work and work well on the NX.  This might well mean patching some to work not only with new hardware but with a new controller.  This brings me on to my next point...

Controller

In order to keep costs down for themselves and life simple for developers Nintendo have to release the NX with a relatively standard gaming controller perhaps like the Wii U pro controller.  They have to face the facts that the days of the Wii are over and release a gaming machine which is 

 

What's wrong with this?

designed with gamers in mind.  Therefore reverting to the Wii controller would be a mistake.  Including two controllers in the basic package would be too awkward financially.

Even if they do all this I still think Nintendo will have to incentivise publishers to release their games on the NX, at least at first.  This and the high powered console at a reasonable price will mean that Nintendo can expect the machine to be loss making to start with, just not as loss making as releasing another flop.

Well that's what I think.  Please feel free to leave your comments below and don't forget to follow this blog using the link in the right hand column and visit my YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/petracogaming

More next Tuesday...

Past Perfect

From now on I mean to update this Blog every Tuesday.  This entry might seem a bit negative but I hope future ones will be more upbeat.  Please remember to follow me using the button in the right column.  You can also visit my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/petracogaming.

I recently read an article in gamesTM issue 167 about the development of the Xbox 360 and couldn’t help feeling that the interviewee, J Allard, who was a senior developer on the team which designed the console, had rather a selective memory about how good the machine was and the extent of its commercial success.

The 360s true contribution to gaming posterity was a negative one and one for which gamers are still literally paying.  “From a business point of view we had a few simple goals…it was to exceed ten million Xbox Live subscribers within five years,” boasts Allard.  He continues “From an experience point of view we wanted to deliver a console that…felt incomplete if you were offline”.

I find it cynical that Allard is proud to have created something which you could pay £250 for only to get it home and find that you had not finished forking out; and never would.

Allard also claims that the team working on the Xbox 360 foresaw the advent of digital distribution of games and add-on content and the demise of physical media and that the rest of the games industry had to be dragged along.  "...the industry didn't have faith in...downloadable content or digital distribution."  He says.

Given that the first model of the 360 had a 20 GB hard drive I find it hard to believe that Microsoft were anticipating an era of downloadable games in 2002.  More likely Allard is retrospectively trying to trivialise PS3s superior Blue-ray media.  He is also disregarding the fact that, even though Xbox One and PS4 both have substantial hard drives almost all triple-A games are still released on disc.

Allard's insecurities about Sony's higher capacity discs seem to be exposed again when he he later comments "we spent a stupid amount of time on stuff like HD-DVD in response to the competition...A new format for high-resolution movies was not important to us...the HD-DVD effort was a good example of how worrying about the competition can take you off your game."

I read this as meaning "we tried with HD-DVD, it didn't work out for us."

After the Xbox 360 project was over Allard worked first on developing Zune (Microsoft's iPod) and then on a prototype tablet called Courier.  After those two unqualified successes he "retired" from Microsoft and now runs his own bicycle security software company.

As for the 360s commercial success?  In the Anglo-Saxon world it was a massive hit, but this regional success tends to inform the view of many English speaking commentators.  Worldwide Xbox 360 was outsold both by the Wii and (marginally) by the PS3 making it the least successful home console of it's generation.

I am a PlayStation owner and player but I do not criticise Xbox for the sake of it.  Xbox 360 was an excellent machine.  It is J Allard and his selective memory I object to.