Nintendo Loses Nearly $1B As Wii Sales Plummet

Saist said:

You sir, are an idiot.

So is everybody else in this thread whose spouting off "HD" like it means something.

I'm really surprised I'm seeing this on the HardOCP forums, so I'll make this quick and brief.

High-Definition does not exist.

Let me repeat that for the slow among you forum posters: High-Definition Does Not Exist.


When it comes to improving a rendering image there are largely two methods that apply to video games:

• Increase the number of pixels rendered for each frame -- that is to say High-Resolution
• Increase the amount of color detail, texture detail, polygon detail, and or shader detail -- that is to say High-resolution art assets.

The term "High-Definition" has been abused as a catch-all term for cranking up the resolution of the rendered image and the corrosponding resolution of the art assets by marketing punters who don't understand how video games or designed or made.

Let me clue you in on something that even Digipen students don't have a firm grasp on.

When it comes to consoles with limited and unchanging hardware specifications, as a coder or an artist, you approach the console with those limitations in mind, and you do your level best to toe those limitations as closely as you can. You also try to toe those lines while keeping the -minimum- specification in mind.

The Wii is primarily designed with 480p as it's upper resolution limit and 480i as it's lower resolution limit. That means that every single texture, every single rendering frame, has to be able to be rendered in either a 480p or 480i window. This means that artists don't have to create textures, polygons, or shaders, that exceed the limitations of that window.

You can see this type of art-asset limitation in games such as UT99, Dues Ex, Advent Rising, or even Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. Go chunk those games on a high-resolution monitor such as 1920*1200. At 10 feet away, can you -really- tell a difference in the higher pixel resolution versus running those games in a much lower resolution such as 720*480? Sure, you -might- be able to tell a difference in a 1ft to 2ft range where you can count the polygons and actually make out the pixel distortion inherent to LCD panels running out of their native resolution.

* * *​

Btw, here's a hint: Nintendo tried a mid-life-console system upgrade once with the 4mb memory pack on the N64. Sega tried a mid-life-console upgrade not just once, but twice: SegaCD and Sega32X.

The console reality is that simply chunking a couple extra GPU units into the Wii and increasing the frame-buffer simply to enable rendering in higher-resolution pixel counts and increased resolution-texture counts isn't possible. While the Wii has a traditional CPU/GPU setup, it has a shared 24mb low-latency memory system coupled with a not-as-fast 64mb GDDR3 memory system. Feeding those higher resolution art assets would require an increased system bandwidth, which means not only raising the clockspeed and or bit-rate of the system bus, it also means increasing the amount of system memory for BOTH types of Ram.

If you figured out this means essentially designing another console... congratulations, you've just passed Zelda Blob Studios 101.

This is where you run into the problems that Nintendo experienced with the N64 expansion pack. New code designed to leverage the increased system capacity, by laws of coding physics, will not work on systems without that increased system capacity.


This leaves developers with a choice.

• They can implement a solution that only increases an aspect of system usage, such as rendering, that can be scaled on demand, in the case of the N64 that was resolution and or color depth. For the N64 the increased color depth offered a larger visual difference since it improved the art-assets, improvements that largely weren't noticed on games that simply doubled the resolution without doubling textures or polygon counts.
• They can implement a solution that fully leverages the new system capacity and completely forget about trying to back-port onto previous constraints: See Majora's Mask and Donkey Kong 64
• They can implement a solution that has some content locked behind increased system capacity and some content available on the original platform: see Perfect Dark.

* * *​

Assuming developers get past the coding limitations, then there becomes the matter of content delivery. Granted this is not really a big problem in and of-itself since most Wii-games are shovelware because Developers didn't know what to do with the system, or games are crap because Developers didn't know what to do with the system (Sega, EA, Activision, that would be you).

It's a fair stretch to say that -most- Wii games probably have space on the DVD drive for higher-resolution art assets. Case in point would be Metroid Prime Trilogy which managed to fit 2 Gamecube games and the third Wii game on a single disc... although this did mean the cutting of many extras from both consoles... and Retro Studios could actually re-leverage a significant amount of textures... which... to the point... they kind of did when creating the games to begin with.

Actually getting higher resolution art assets to players may or may not require a new loading system... and to be fair... the cost of printing discs is low enough publishers probably could afford to include both a high-resolution art-asset version of a game in the same box as the Wii's base art-asset version.

That being said the Xbox 360 is a perfect example of developers running into platform delivery problems. Anybody who cares could probably name all of the Xbox 360 games that had to come on multiple discs compared to their single disc Playstation 3 versions. For the most part game developers have been crippled by the lack of a high-capacity system-spec storage delivery solution for the Xbox 360. But this post isn't about "What was good for Microsoft wasn't good for the consumer"

* * *​

The production reality for Nintendo is that making a console that is capable of rendering in a higher-pixel-resolution with a higher-detail-resolution boils down to making a completely new consoles. Which, incidentally, Nintendo is doing with the WiiU.

Now, the big question is this: will a higher-resolution console attract game developers?

Nobody knows. One of the problems the Wii console ran into is that publishers and developers had written Nintendo off. It was no secret that everybody but Ubisoft had decreased budgetary spending on Nintendo products, and that Nintendo support wasn't even tertiary among training or production for publishers and developers.

The aftermath of the Wii's sales explosion and market dominance left most third-party developers and publishers with their heads spinning. The desperation to get something, anything, on the Wii platform, lead to the flood of shovelware titles early on in the life of the Wii as publishers and developers scrambled to keep their brand-names fresh in the mind of Wii purchasers. Slight problem: a -bad- game will only turn people away.

When gamers did get proper games, such as Resident Evil 4, the publishers being those games decided to keep trying "different" stuff... case in point with Capcom is they kept doing bloody rail-gun games on the Wii with Umbrella:Chronicles rather than a proper Resident Evil Adventure game. Same thing with Dead Space. The big consoles got a proper adventure title. The Wii got a light-gun shooter. The lack of sales shouldn't have really been a big surprise to anybody. No matter how marketers tried dress it up, gamers weren't buying the Wii to play light-gun shooters.


When it came to getting big franchise titles such as

Call of Duty​

on the Wii, development was handed off to developers who simply didn't care about making a good games; or alternatively, simply were not capable of making good games.

Unfortunately the WiiU may face a similar problem. It will land on store shelves only a year or so before Sony and Microsoft are due to haul out their next consoles, the so called Xbox 720 and the Playstation 4.

If publishers and developers do the same thing they did back with the launch of the Wii, that is focus a significant amount of primary resources on Sony and Microsoft's next console entries, the WiiU will once again be regaled to the back corners of B-team portings from developers who simply don't give a damn.

Click to expand...

Saist said:

You sir, are an idiot.

So is everybody else in this thread whose spouting off "HD" like it means something.

I'm really surprised I'm seeing this on the HardOCP forums, so I'll make this quick and brief.

High-Definition does not exist.

Let me repeat that for the slow among you forum posters: High-Definition Does Not Exist.

When it comes to improving a rendering image there are largely two methods that apply to video games:

• Increase the number of pixels rendered for each frame -- that is to say High-Resolution
• Increase the amount of color detail, texture detail, polygon detail, and or shader detail -- that is to say High-resolution art assets.

The term "High-Definition" has been abused as a catch-all term for cranking up the resolution of the rendered image and the corrosponding resolution of the art assets by marketing punters who don't understand how video games or designed or made.

Let me clue you in on something that even Digipen students don't have a firm grasp on.

When it comes to consoles with limited and unchanging hardware specifications, as a coder or an artist, you approach the console with those limitations in mind, and you do your level best to toe those limitations as closely as you can. You also try to toe those lines while keeping the -minimum- specification in mind.

The Wii is primarily designed with 480p as it's upper resolution limit and 480i as it's lower resolution limit. That means that every single texture, every single rendering frame, has to be able to be rendered in either a 480p or 480i window. This means that artists don't have to create textures, polygons, or shaders, that exceed the limitations of that window.

You can see this type of art-asset limitation in games such as UT99, Dues Ex, Advent Rising, or even Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. Go chunk those games on a high-resolution monitor such as 1920*1200. At 10 feet away, can you -really- tell a difference in the higher pixel resolution versus running those games in a much lower resolution such as 720*480? Sure, you -might- be able to tell a difference in a 1ft to 2ft range where you can count the polygons and actually make out the pixel distortion inherent to LCD panels running out of their native resolution.

* * *​

Btw, here's a hint: Nintendo tried a mid-life-console system upgrade once with the 4mb memory pack on the N64. Sega tried a mid-life-console upgrade not just once, but twice: SegaCD and Sega32X.

The console reality is that simply chunking a couple extra GPU units into the Wii and increasing the frame-buffer simply to enable rendering in higher-resolution pixel counts and increased resolution-texture counts isn't possible. While the Wii has a traditional CPU/GPU setup, it has a shared 24mb low-latency memory system coupled with a not-as-fast 64mb GDDR3 memory system. Feeding those higher resolution art assets would require an increased system bandwidth, which means not only raising the clockspeed and or bit-rate of the system bus, it also means increasing the amount of system memory for BOTH types of Ram.

If you figured out this means essentially designing another console... congratulations, you've just passed Zelda Blob Studios 101.

This is where you run into the problems that Nintendo experienced with the N64 expansion pack. New code designed to leverage the increased system capacity, by laws of coding physics, will not work on systems without that increased system capacity.

This leaves developers with a choice.

• They can implement a solution that only increases an aspect of system usage, such as rendering, that can be scaled on demand, in the case of the N64 that was resolution and or color depth. For the N64 the increased color depth offered a larger visual difference since it improved the art-assets, improvements that largely weren't noticed on games that simply doubled the resolution without doubling textures or polygon counts.
• They can implement a solution that fully leverages the new system capacity and completely forget about trying to back-port onto previous constraints: See Majora's Mask and Donkey Kong 64
• They can implement a solution that has some content locked behind increased system capacity and some content available on the original platform: see Perfect Dark.

* * *​

Assuming developers get past the coding limitations, then there becomes the matter of content delivery. Granted this is not really a big problem in and of-itself since most Wii-games are shovelware because Developers didn't know what to do with the system, or games are crap because Developers didn't know what to do with the system (Sega, EA, Activision, that would be you).

It's a fair stretch to say that -most- Wii games probably have space on the DVD drive for higher-resolution art assets. Case in point would be Metroid Prime Trilogy which managed to fit 2 Gamecube games and the third Wii game on a single disc... although this did mean the cutting of many extras from both consoles... and Retro Studios could actually re-leverage a significant amount of textures... which... to the point... they kind of did when creating the games to begin with.

Actually getting higher resolution art assets to players may or may not require a new loading system... and to be fair... the cost of printing discs is low enough publishers probably could afford to include both a high-resolution art-asset version of a game in the same box as the Wii's base art-asset version.

That being said the Xbox 360 is a perfect example of developers running into platform delivery problems. Anybody who cares could probably name all of the Xbox 360 games that had to come on multiple discs compared to their single disc Playstation 3 versions. For the most part game developers have been crippled by the lack of a high-capacity system-spec storage delivery solution for the Xbox 360. But this post isn't about "What was good for Microsoft wasn't good for the consumer"

* * *​

The production reality for Nintendo is that making a console that is capable of rendering in a higher-pixel-resolution with a higher-detail-resolution boils down to making a completely new consoles. Which, incidentally, Nintendo is doing with the WiiU.

Now, the big question is this: will a higher-resolution console attract game developers?

Nobody knows. One of the problems the Wii console ran into is that publishers and developers had written Nintendo off. It was no secret that everybody but Ubisoft had decreased budgetary spending on Nintendo products, and that Nintendo support wasn't even tertiary among training or production for publishers and developers.

The aftermath of the Wii's sales explosion and market dominance left most third-party developers and publishers with their heads spinning. The desperation to get something, anything, on the Wii platform, lead to the flood of shovelware titles early on in the life of the Wii as publishers and developers scrambled to keep their brand-names fresh in the mind of Wii purchasers. Slight problem: a -bad- game will only turn people away.

When gamers did get proper games, such as Resident Evil 4, the publishers being those games decided to keep trying "different" stuff... case in point with Capcom is they kept doing bloody rail-gun games on the Wii with Umbrella:Chronicles rather than a proper Resident Evil Adventure game. Same thing with Dead Space. The big consoles got a proper adventure title. The Wii got a light-gun shooter. The lack of sales shouldn't have really been a big surprise to anybody. No matter how marketers tried dress it up, gamers weren't buying the Wii to play light-gun shooters.

When it came to getting big franchise titles such as

Call of Duty​

on the Wii, development was handed off to developers who simply didn't care about making a good games; or alternatively, simply were not capable of making good games.

Unfortunately the WiiU may face a similar problem. It will land on store shelves only a year or so before Sony and Microsoft are due to haul out their next consoles, the so called Xbox 720 and the Playstation 4.

If publishers and developers do the same thing they did back with the launch of the Wii, that is focus a significant amount of primary resources on Sony and Microsoft's next console entries, the WiiU will once again be regaled to the back corners of B-team portings from developers who simply don't give a damn.

Click to expand...

Saist said:

You sir, are an idiot.

So is everybody else in this thread whose spouting off "HD" like it means something.

I'm really surprised I'm seeing this on the HardOCP forums, so I'll make this quick and brief.

High-Definition does not exist.

Let me repeat that for the slow among you forum posters: High-Definition Does Not Exist.

When it comes to improving a rendering image there are largely two methods that apply to video games:

• Increase the number of pixels rendered for each frame -- that is to say High-Resolution
• Increase the amount of color detail, texture detail, polygon detail, and or shader detail -- that is to say High-resolution art assets.

The term "High-Definition" has been abused as a catch-all term for cranking up the resolution of the rendered image and the corrosponding resolution of the art assets by marketing punters who don't understand how video games or designed or made.

Let me clue you in on something that even Digipen students don't have a firm grasp on.

When it comes to consoles with limited and unchanging hardware specifications, as a coder or an artist, you approach the console with those limitations in mind, and you do your level best to toe those limitations as closely as you can. You also try to toe those lines while keeping the -minimum- specification in mind.

The Wii is primarily designed with 480p as it's upper resolution limit and 480i as it's lower resolution limit. That means that every single texture, every single rendering frame, has to be able to be rendered in either a 480p or 480i window. This means that artists don't have to create textures, polygons, or shaders, that exceed the limitations of that window.

You can see this type of art-asset limitation in games such as UT99, Dues Ex, Advent Rising, or even Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. Go chunk those games on a high-resolution monitor such as 1920*1200. At 10 feet away, can you -really- tell a difference in the higher pixel resolution versus running those games in a much lower resolution such as 720*480? Sure, you -might- be able to tell a difference in a 1ft to 2ft range where you can count the polygons and actually make out the pixel distortion inherent to LCD panels running out of their native resolution.

* * *​

Btw, here's a hint: Nintendo tried a mid-life-console system upgrade once with the 4mb memory pack on the N64. Sega tried a mid-life-console upgrade not just once, but twice: SegaCD and Sega32X.

The console reality is that simply chunking a couple extra GPU units into the Wii and increasing the frame-buffer simply to enable rendering in higher-resolution pixel counts and increased resolution-texture counts isn't possible. While the Wii has a traditional CPU/GPU setup, it has a shared 24mb low-latency memory system coupled with a not-as-fast 64mb GDDR3 memory system. Feeding those higher resolution art assets would require an increased system bandwidth, which means not only raising the clockspeed and or bit-rate of the system bus, it also means increasing the amount of system memory for BOTH types of Ram.

If you figured out this means essentially designing another console... congratulations, you've just passed Zelda Blob Studios 101.

This is where you run into the problems that Nintendo experienced with the N64 expansion pack. New code designed to leverage the increased system capacity, by laws of coding physics, will not work on systems without that increased system capacity.

This leaves developers with a choice.

• They can implement a solution that only increases an aspect of system usage, such as rendering, that can be scaled on demand, in the case of the N64 that was resolution and or color depth. For the N64 the increased color depth offered a larger visual difference since it improved the art-assets, improvements that largely weren't noticed on games that simply doubled the resolution without doubling textures or polygon counts.
• They can implement a solution that fully leverages the new system capacity and completely forget about trying to back-port onto previous constraints: See Majora's Mask and Donkey Kong 64
• They can implement a solution that has some content locked behind increased system capacity and some content available on the original platform: see Perfect Dark.

* * *​

Assuming developers get past the coding limitations, then there becomes the matter of content delivery. Granted this is not really a big problem in and of-itself since most Wii-games are shovelware because Developers didn't know what to do with the system, or games are crap because Developers didn't know what to do with the system (Sega, EA, Activision, that would be you).

It's a fair stretch to say that -most- Wii games probably have space on the DVD drive for higher-resolution art assets. Case in point would be Metroid Prime Trilogy which managed to fit 2 Gamecube games and the third Wii game on a single disc... although this did mean the cutting of many extras from both consoles... and Retro Studios could actually re-leverage a significant amount of textures... which... to the point... they kind of did when creating the games to begin with.

Actually getting higher resolution art assets to players may or may not require a new loading system... and to be fair... the cost of printing discs is low enough publishers probably could afford to include both a high-resolution art-asset version of a game in the same box as the Wii's base art-asset version.

That being said the Xbox 360 is a perfect example of developers running into platform delivery problems. Anybody who cares could probably name all of the Xbox 360 games that had to come on multiple discs compared to their single disc Playstation 3 versions. For the most part game developers have been crippled by the lack of a high-capacity system-spec storage delivery solution for the Xbox 360. But this post isn't about "What was good for Microsoft wasn't good for the consumer"

* * *​

The production reality for Nintendo is that making a console that is capable of rendering in a higher-pixel-resolution with a higher-detail-resolution boils down to making a completely new consoles. Which, incidentally, Nintendo is doing with the WiiU.

Now, the big question is this: will a higher-resolution console attract game developers?

Nobody knows. One of the problems the Wii console ran into is that publishers and developers had written Nintendo off. It was no secret that everybody but Ubisoft had decreased budgetary spending on Nintendo products, and that Nintendo support wasn't even tertiary among training or production for publishers and developers.

The aftermath of the Wii's sales explosion and market dominance left most third-party developers and publishers with their heads spinning. The desperation to get something, anything, on the Wii platform, lead to the flood of shovelware titles early on in the life of the Wii as publishers and developers scrambled to keep their brand-names fresh in the mind of Wii purchasers. Slight problem: a -bad- game will only turn people away.

When gamers did get proper games, such as Resident Evil 4, the publishers being those games decided to keep trying "different" stuff... case in point with Capcom is they kept doing bloody rail-gun games on the Wii with Umbrella:Chronicles rather than a proper Resident Evil Adventure game. Same thing with Dead Space. The big consoles got a proper adventure title. The Wii got a light-gun shooter. The lack of sales shouldn't have really been a big surprise to anybody. No matter how marketers tried dress it up, gamers weren't buying the Wii to play light-gun shooters.

When it came to getting big franchise titles such as

Call of Duty​

on the Wii, development was handed off to developers who simply didn't care about making a good games; or alternatively, simply were not capable of making good games.

Unfortunately the WiiU may face a similar problem. It will land on store shelves only a year or so before Sony and Microsoft are due to haul out their next consoles, the so called Xbox 720 and the Playstation 4.

If publishers and developers do the same thing they did back with the launch of the Wii, that is focus a significant amount of primary resources on Sony and Microsoft's next console entries, the WiiU will once again be regaled to the back corners of B-team portings from developers who simply don't give a damn.

Click to expand...

Saist said:

You sir, are an idiot.

Click to expand...

3DChipset said:

Here's a thought, maybe everyone who wanted a Wii has already bought it? I'm confused on why Nintendo believes that they should be breaking record profits every single year. If everyone has the unit already of course you should see a fall in sales. It's simply, "Supply and Demand".... The demand isn't there because EVERYONE HAS BOUGHT IT ALREADY!!! lol...

Click to expand...

Koolthulu said:

I just don't get this thing companies have for announcing new products over a year in advance. It gives them no benefit, and costs them a lot because people will wait for the new version.

Click to expand...

Saist said:

You sir, are an idiot.

So is everybody else in this thread whose spouting off "HD" like it means something.

I'm really surprised I'm seeing this on the HardOCP forums, so I'll make this quick and brief.

High-Definition does not exist.

Let me repeat that for the slow among you forum posters: High-Definition Does Not Exist.

When it comes to improving a rendering image there are largely two methods that apply to video games:

• Increase the number of pixels rendered for each frame -- that is to say High-Resolution
• Increase the amount of color detail, texture detail, polygon detail, and or shader detail -- that is to say High-resolution art assets.

The term "High-Definition" has been abused as a catch-all term for cranking up the resolution of the rendered image and the corrosponding resolution of the art assets by marketing punters who don't understand how video games or designed or made.

Let me clue you in on something that even Digipen students don't have a firm grasp on.

When it comes to consoles with limited and unchanging hardware specifications, as a coder or an artist, you approach the console with those limitations in mind, and you do your level best to toe those limitations as closely as you can. You also try to toe those lines while keeping the -minimum- specification in mind.

The Wii is primarily designed with 480p as it's upper resolution limit and 480i as it's lower resolution limit. That means that every single texture, every single rendering frame, has to be able to be rendered in either a 480p or 480i window. This means that artists don't have to create textures, polygons, or shaders, that exceed the limitations of that window.

You can see this type of art-asset limitation in games such as UT99, Dues Ex, Advent Rising, or even Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. Go chunk those games on a high-resolution monitor such as 1920*1200. At 10 feet away, can you -really- tell a difference in the higher pixel resolution versus running those games in a much lower resolution such as 720*480? Sure, you -might- be able to tell a difference in a 1ft to 2ft range where you can count the polygons and actually make out the pixel distortion inherent to LCD panels running out of their native resolution.

* * *​

Btw, here's a hint: Nintendo tried a mid-life-console system upgrade once with the 4mb memory pack on the N64. Sega tried a mid-life-console upgrade not just once, but twice: SegaCD and Sega32X.

The console reality is that simply chunking a couple extra GPU units into the Wii and increasing the frame-buffer simply to enable rendering in higher-resolution pixel counts and increased resolution-texture counts isn't possible. While the Wii has a traditional CPU/GPU setup, it has a shared 24mb low-latency memory system coupled with a not-as-fast 64mb GDDR3 memory system. Feeding those higher resolution art assets would require an increased system bandwidth, which means not only raising the clockspeed and or bit-rate of the system bus, it also means increasing the amount of system memory for BOTH types of Ram.

If you figured out this means essentially designing another console... congratulations, you've just passed Zelda Blob Studios 101.

This is where you run into the problems that Nintendo experienced with the N64 expansion pack. New code designed to leverage the increased system capacity, by laws of coding physics, will not work on systems without that increased system capacity.

This leaves developers with a choice.

• They can implement a solution that only increases an aspect of system usage, such as rendering, that can be scaled on demand, in the case of the N64 that was resolution and or color depth. For the N64 the increased color depth offered a larger visual difference since it improved the art-assets, improvements that largely weren't noticed on games that simply doubled the resolution without doubling textures or polygon counts.
• They can implement a solution that fully leverages the new system capacity and completely forget about trying to back-port onto previous constraints: See Majora's Mask and Donkey Kong 64
• They can implement a solution that has some content locked behind increased system capacity and some content available on the original platform: see Perfect Dark.

* * *​

Assuming developers get past the coding limitations, then there becomes the matter of content delivery. Granted this is not really a big problem in and of-itself since most Wii-games are shovelware because Developers didn't know what to do with the system, or games are crap because Developers didn't know what to do with the system (Sega, EA, Activision, that would be you).

It's a fair stretch to say that -most- Wii games probably have space on the DVD drive for higher-resolution art assets. Case in point would be Metroid Prime Trilogy which managed to fit 2 Gamecube games and the third Wii game on a single disc... although this did mean the cutting of many extras from both consoles... and Retro Studios could actually re-leverage a significant amount of textures... which... to the point... they kind of did when creating the games to begin with.

Actually getting higher resolution art assets to players may or may not require a new loading system... and to be fair... the cost of printing discs is low enough publishers probably could afford to include both a high-resolution art-asset version of a game in the same box as the Wii's base art-asset version.

That being said the Xbox 360 is a perfect example of developers running into platform delivery problems. Anybody who cares could probably name all of the Xbox 360 games that had to come on multiple discs compared to their single disc Playstation 3 versions. For the most part game developers have been crippled by the lack of a high-capacity system-spec storage delivery solution for the Xbox 360. But this post isn't about "What was good for Microsoft wasn't good for the consumer"

* * *​

The production reality for Nintendo is that making a console that is capable of rendering in a higher-pixel-resolution with a higher-detail-resolution boils down to making a completely new consoles. Which, incidentally, Nintendo is doing with the WiiU.

Now, the big question is this: will a higher-resolution console attract game developers?

Nobody knows. One of the problems the Wii console ran into is that publishers and developers had written Nintendo off. It was no secret that everybody but Ubisoft had decreased budgetary spending on Nintendo products, and that Nintendo support wasn't even tertiary among training or production for publishers and developers.

The aftermath of the Wii's sales explosion and market dominance left most third-party developers and publishers with their heads spinning. The desperation to get something, anything, on the Wii platform, lead to the flood of shovelware titles early on in the life of the Wii as publishers and developers scrambled to keep their brand-names fresh in the mind of Wii purchasers. Slight problem: a -bad- game will only turn people away.

When gamers did get proper games, such as Resident Evil 4, the publishers being those games decided to keep trying "different" stuff... case in point with Capcom is they kept doing bloody rail-gun games on the Wii with Umbrella:Chronicles rather than a proper Resident Evil Adventure game. Same thing with Dead Space. The big consoles got a proper adventure title. The Wii got a light-gun shooter. The lack of sales shouldn't have really been a big surprise to anybody. No matter how marketers tried dress it up, gamers weren't buying the Wii to play light-gun shooters.

When it came to getting big franchise titles such as

Call of Duty​

on the Wii, development was handed off to developers who simply didn't care about making a good games; or alternatively, simply were not capable of making good games.

Unfortunately the WiiU may face a similar problem. It will land on store shelves only a year or so before Sony and Microsoft are due to haul out their next consoles, the so called Xbox 720 and the Playstation 4.

If publishers and developers do the same thing they did back with the launch of the Wii, that is focus a significant amount of primary resources on Sony and Microsoft's next console entries, the WiiU will once again be regaled to the back corners of B-team portings from developers who simply don't give a damn.

Click to expand...

Saist said:

You sir, are an idiot.

So is everybody else in this thread whose spouting off "HD" like it means something.

I'm really surprised I'm seeing this on the HardOCP forums, so I'll make this quick and brief.

High-Definition does not exist.

Let me repeat that for the slow among you forum posters: High-Definition Does Not Exist.

When it comes to improving a rendering image there are largely two methods that apply to video games:

• Increase the number of pixels rendered for each frame -- that is to say High-Resolution
• Increase the amount of color detail, texture detail, polygon detail, and or shader detail -- that is to say High-resolution art assets.

The term "High-Definition" has been abused as a catch-all term for cranking up the resolution of the rendered image and the corrosponding resolution of the art assets by marketing punters who don't understand how video games or designed or made.

Let me clue you in on something that even Digipen students don't have a firm grasp on.

When it comes to consoles with limited and unchanging hardware specifications, as a coder or an artist, you approach the console with those limitations in mind, and you do your level best to toe those limitations as closely as you can. You also try to toe those lines while keeping the -minimum- specification in mind.

The Wii is primarily designed with 480p as it's upper resolution limit and 480i as it's lower resolution limit. That means that every single texture, every single rendering frame, has to be able to be rendered in either a 480p or 480i window. This means that artists don't have to create textures, polygons, or shaders, that exceed the limitations of that window.

You can see this type of art-asset limitation in games such as UT99, Dues Ex, Advent Rising, or even Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. Go chunk those games on a high-resolution monitor such as 1920*1200. At 10 feet away, can you -really- tell a difference in the higher pixel resolution versus running those games in a much lower resolution such as 720*480? Sure, you -might- be able to tell a difference in a 1ft to 2ft range where you can count the polygons and actually make out the pixel distortion inherent to LCD panels running out of their native resolution.

* * *​

Btw, here's a hint: Nintendo tried a mid-life-console system upgrade once with the 4mb memory pack on the N64. Sega tried a mid-life-console upgrade not just once, but twice: SegaCD and Sega32X.

The console reality is that simply chunking a couple extra GPU units into the Wii and increasing the frame-buffer simply to enable rendering in higher-resolution pixel counts and increased resolution-texture counts isn't possible. While the Wii has a traditional CPU/GPU setup, it has a shared 24mb low-latency memory system coupled with a not-as-fast 64mb GDDR3 memory system. Feeding those higher resolution art assets would require an increased system bandwidth, which means not only raising the clockspeed and or bit-rate of the system bus, it also means increasing the amount of system memory for BOTH types of Ram.

If you figured out this means essentially designing another console... congratulations, you've just passed Zelda Blob Studios 101.

This is where you run into the problems that Nintendo experienced with the N64 expansion pack. New code designed to leverage the increased system capacity, by laws of coding physics, will not work on systems without that increased system capacity.

This leaves developers with a choice.

• They can implement a solution that only increases an aspect of system usage, such as rendering, that can be scaled on demand, in the case of the N64 that was resolution and or color depth. For the N64 the increased color depth offered a larger visual difference since it improved the art-assets, improvements that largely weren't noticed on games that simply doubled the resolution without doubling textures or polygon counts.
• They can implement a solution that fully leverages the new system capacity and completely forget about trying to back-port onto previous constraints: See Majora's Mask and Donkey Kong 64
• They can implement a solution that has some content locked behind increased system capacity and some content available on the original platform: see Perfect Dark.

* * *​

Assuming developers get past the coding limitations, then there becomes the matter of content delivery. Granted this is not really a big problem in and of-itself since most Wii-games are shovelware because Developers didn't know what to do with the system, or games are crap because Developers didn't know what to do with the system (Sega, EA, Activision, that would be you).

It's a fair stretch to say that -most- Wii games probably have space on the DVD drive for higher-resolution art assets. Case in point would be Metroid Prime Trilogy which managed to fit 2 Gamecube games and the third Wii game on a single disc... although this did mean the cutting of many extras from both consoles... and Retro Studios could actually re-leverage a significant amount of textures... which... to the point... they kind of did when creating the games to begin with.

Actually getting higher resolution art assets to players may or may not require a new loading system... and to be fair... the cost of printing discs is low enough publishers probably could afford to include both a high-resolution art-asset version of a game in the same box as the Wii's base art-asset version.

That being said the Xbox 360 is a perfect example of developers running into platform delivery problems. Anybody who cares could probably name all of the Xbox 360 games that had to come on multiple discs compared to their single disc Playstation 3 versions. For the most part game developers have been crippled by the lack of a high-capacity system-spec storage delivery solution for the Xbox 360. But this post isn't about "What was good for Microsoft wasn't good for the consumer"

* * *​

The production reality for Nintendo is that making a console that is capable of rendering in a higher-pixel-resolution with a higher-detail-resolution boils down to making a completely new consoles. Which, incidentally, Nintendo is doing with the WiiU.

Now, the big question is this: will a higher-resolution console attract game developers?

Nobody knows. One of the problems the Wii console ran into is that publishers and developers had written Nintendo off. It was no secret that everybody but Ubisoft had decreased budgetary spending on Nintendo products, and that Nintendo support wasn't even tertiary among training or production for publishers and developers.

The aftermath of the Wii's sales explosion and market dominance left most third-party developers and publishers with their heads spinning. The desperation to get something, anything, on the Wii platform, lead to the flood of shovelware titles early on in the life of the Wii as publishers and developers scrambled to keep their brand-names fresh in the mind of Wii purchasers. Slight problem: a -bad- game will only turn people away.

When gamers did get proper games, such as Resident Evil 4, the publishers being those games decided to keep trying "different" stuff... case in point with Capcom is they kept doing bloody rail-gun games on the Wii with Umbrella:Chronicles rather than a proper Resident Evil Adventure game. Same thing with Dead Space. The big consoles got a proper adventure title. The Wii got a light-gun shooter. The lack of sales shouldn't have really been a big surprise to anybody. No matter how marketers tried dress it up, gamers weren't buying the Wii to play light-gun shooters.

When it came to getting big franchise titles such as

Call of Duty​

on the Wii, development was handed off to developers who simply didn't care about making a good games; or alternatively, simply were not capable of making good games.

Unfortunately the WiiU may face a similar problem. It will land on store shelves only a year or so before Sony and Microsoft are due to haul out their next consoles, the so called Xbox 720 and the Playstation 4.

If publishers and developers do the same thing they did back with the launch of the Wii, that is focus a significant amount of primary resources on Sony and Microsoft's next console entries, the WiiU will once again be regaled to the back corners of B-team portings from developers who simply don't give a damn.

Click to expand...

Marduk77 said:

Nintendo just needs to go the way of Sega and make games.

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eon said:

I cant believe so many of yall are praising that guy's pretentious post. Someone just mentions "HD" and you insult him in some lecture?? I think most know HD is a misnomer, so get off the soap box and calm down.

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eon said:

I cant believe so many of yall are praising that guy's pretentious post. Someone just mentions "HD" and you insult him in some lecture?? I think most know HD is a misnomer, so get off the soap box and calm down.

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Kardonxt said:

Maybe not so much old as in flat out ugly. Plenty of milfs out there who would look better with a wii in their hand.

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Falkentyne said:

Your taste in women is absolutely reprehensible. She's actually pretty cute. Wouldn't mind dating her...

Click to expand...

Tzzird said:

You forget that this is [H]. All its users are 9's and 10's and would only accept a woman that is either a 9 or a 10.

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viscountalpha said:

Nintendo keeps screwing themselves by not having another 2nd party game. The whole cockblock the 3rd party developer needs to stop. They need another RARE. Rare games made the NES for me. Solar jetman, Snake rattle and roll (*sigh*) battletoads. And then for the N64, golden eye? perfect dark? Banjo kazooie?

Some of the top titles on those consoles was due to RARE making it happen. That is what Nintendo needed yesterday.

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westrock2000 said:

I do enjoy consoles though. And my favorite is still the incredibly craptacular Virtualboy. It was so bad it was awsome.

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PsychoAMD said:

isn't she a bit old to be a video game model?

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Saist said:

You sir, are an idiot.

So is everybody else in this thread whose spouting off "HD" like it means something.

I'm really surprised I'm seeing this on the HardOCP forums, so I'll make this quick and brief.

High-Definition does not exist.

Let me repeat that for the slow among you forum posters: High-Definition Does Not Exist.

When it comes to improving a rendering image there are largely two methods that apply to video games:

• Increase the number of pixels rendered for each frame -- that is to say High-Resolution
• Increase the amount of color detail, texture detail, polygon detail, and or shader detail -- that is to say High-resolution art assets.

The term "High-Definition" has been abused as a catch-all term for cranking up the resolution of the rendered image and the corrosponding resolution of the art assets by marketing punters who don't understand how video games or designed or made.

Let me clue you in on something that even Digipen students don't have a firm grasp on.

When it comes to consoles with limited and unchanging hardware specifications, as a coder or an artist, you approach the console with those limitations in mind, and you do your level best to toe those limitations as closely as you can. You also try to toe those lines while keeping the -minimum- specification in mind.

The Wii is primarily designed with 480p as it's upper resolution limit and 480i as it's lower resolution limit. That means that every single texture, every single rendering frame, has to be able to be rendered in either a 480p or 480i window. This means that artists don't have to create textures, polygons, or shaders, that exceed the limitations of that window.

You can see this type of art-asset limitation in games such as UT99, Dues Ex, Advent Rising, or even Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. Go chunk those games on a high-resolution monitor such as 1920*1200. At 10 feet away, can you -really- tell a difference in the higher pixel resolution versus running those games in a much lower resolution such as 720*480? Sure, you -might- be able to tell a difference in a 1ft to 2ft range where you can count the polygons and actually make out the pixel distortion inherent to LCD panels running out of their native resolution.

* * *​

Btw, here's a hint: Nintendo tried a mid-life-console system upgrade once with the 4mb memory pack on the N64. Sega tried a mid-life-console upgrade not just once, but twice: SegaCD and Sega32X.

The console reality is that simply chunking a couple extra GPU units into the Wii and increasing the frame-buffer simply to enable rendering in higher-resolution pixel counts and increased resolution-texture counts isn't possible. While the Wii has a traditional CPU/GPU setup, it has a shared 24mb low-latency memory system coupled with a not-as-fast 64mb GDDR3 memory system. Feeding those higher resolution art assets would require an increased system bandwidth, which means not only raising the clockspeed and or bit-rate of the system bus, it also means increasing the amount of system memory for BOTH types of Ram.

If you figured out this means essentially designing another console... congratulations, you've just passed Zelda Blob Studios 101.

This is where you run into the problems that Nintendo experienced with the N64 expansion pack. New code designed to leverage the increased system capacity, by laws of coding physics, will not work on systems without that increased system capacity.

This leaves developers with a choice.

• They can implement a solution that only increases an aspect of system usage, such as rendering, that can be scaled on demand, in the case of the N64 that was resolution and or color depth. For the N64 the increased color depth offered a larger visual difference since it improved the art-assets, improvements that largely weren't noticed on games that simply doubled the resolution without doubling textures or polygon counts.
• They can implement a solution that fully leverages the new system capacity and completely forget about trying to back-port onto previous constraints: See Majora's Mask and Donkey Kong 64
• They can implement a solution that has some content locked behind increased system capacity and some content available on the original platform: see Perfect Dark.

* * *​

Assuming developers get past the coding limitations, then there becomes the matter of content delivery. Granted this is not really a big problem in and of-itself since most Wii-games are shovelware because Developers didn't know what to do with the system, or games are crap because Developers didn't know what to do with the system (Sega, EA, Activision, that would be you).

It's a fair stretch to say that -most- Wii games probably have space on the DVD drive for higher-resolution art assets. Case in point would be Metroid Prime Trilogy which managed to fit 2 Gamecube games and the third Wii game on a single disc... although this did mean the cutting of many extras from both consoles... and Retro Studios could actually re-leverage a significant amount of textures... which... to the point... they kind of did when creating the games to begin with.

Actually getting higher resolution art assets to players may or may not require a new loading system... and to be fair... the cost of printing discs is low enough publishers probably could afford to include both a high-resolution art-asset version of a game in the same box as the Wii's base art-asset version.

That being said the Xbox 360 is a perfect example of developers running into platform delivery problems. Anybody who cares could probably name all of the Xbox 360 games that had to come on multiple discs compared to their single disc Playstation 3 versions. For the most part game developers have been crippled by the lack of a high-capacity system-spec storage delivery solution for the Xbox 360. But this post isn't about "What was good for Microsoft wasn't good for the consumer"

* * *​

The production reality for Nintendo is that making a console that is capable of rendering in a higher-pixel-resolution with a higher-detail-resolution boils down to making a completely new consoles. Which, incidentally, Nintendo is doing with the WiiU.

Now, the big question is this: will a higher-resolution console attract game developers?

Nobody knows. One of the problems the Wii console ran into is that publishers and developers had written Nintendo off. It was no secret that everybody but Ubisoft had decreased budgetary spending on Nintendo products, and that Nintendo support wasn't even tertiary among training or production for publishers and developers.

The aftermath of the Wii's sales explosion and market dominance left most third-party developers and publishers with their heads spinning. The desperation to get something, anything, on the Wii platform, lead to the flood of shovelware titles early on in the life of the Wii as publishers and developers scrambled to keep their brand-names fresh in the mind of Wii purchasers. Slight problem: a -bad- game will only turn people away.

When gamers did get proper games, such as Resident Evil 4, the publishers being those games decided to keep trying "different" stuff... case in point with Capcom is they kept doing bloody rail-gun games on the Wii with Umbrella:Chronicles rather than a proper Resident Evil Adventure game. Same thing with Dead Space. The big consoles got a proper adventure title. The Wii got a light-gun shooter. The lack of sales shouldn't have really been a big surprise to anybody. No matter how marketers tried dress it up, gamers weren't buying the Wii to play light-gun shooters.

When it came to getting big franchise titles such as

Call of Duty​

on the Wii, development was handed off to developers who simply didn't care about making a good games; or alternatively, simply were not capable of making good games.

Unfortunately the WiiU may face a similar problem. It will land on store shelves only a year or so before Sony and Microsoft are due to haul out their next consoles, the so called Xbox 720 and the Playstation 4.

If publishers and developers do the same thing they did back with the launch of the Wii, that is focus a significant amount of primary resources on Sony and Microsoft's next console entries, the WiiU will once again be regaled to the back corners of B-team portings from developers who simply don't give a damn.

Click to expand...

timtheenchantor said:

They need innovative and intriguing IPs. Rehashed Mario games and Zelda games only go so far.

Click to expand...

LoneWolf said:

This. I haven't seen a blockbuster game released for the Wii in I-don't-know-when. The last Wii game I bought was the new version of Punch-Out!; that was released in 2009 (ouch).

It doesn't even have to have top-end graphics; just the best the Wii can offer, and good gameplay.

Click to expand...

burnin8r said:

people would buy more Wii's if Nintendo engineered a higher console failure rate like M$

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westrock2000 said:

Heres why my Wii is still connected to a TV and my 360 is not.

Xbox is the only product that additionally charges you to use Netflix. Wii & PS3 (and everyone else) lets you freely connect to Netflix.

Once PS3 got the onboard Netflix app I canceled Xbox Live and havent looked back.

I will add that I have launch units and all are still working.

I do enjoy consoles though. And my favorite is still the incredibly craptacular Virtualboy. It was so bad it was awsome.

Click to expand...

Falkentyne said:

Your taste in women is absolutely reprehensible. She's actually pretty cute. Wouldn't mind dating her...

Click to expand...

CookieFactory said:

The fuck is this shit? The guy uses a misnomer and you write a fucking novel in response cause you're so hot and bothered. You are one anal retentive .

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