Well, it was only a matter of time. With the new SKU, owning both consoles will be a much more streamlined experience from the perspective of my wallet. The only real impact of the new Xbox SKU for me personally is that the decision on which platform to get first has become all about the software now (as was inevitable). As attractive exclusives still aren't available and my gaming PC does a great job of overshadowing any appeal of available current-gen console titles, it'll probably come down to my never-quite-subsided Halo fanboyism.
No.. it was MS attempt to force something down the throat of the customer that they didn't want so they could have their vision fulfilled. Customer said screw you (one of the rare instances) and MS has no basically rolled back all the crap they tried to pull with the XOne so the ship doesn't sink further. It remains to be seen if the XOne now gets some more units sold but the damage to the public perception is done and may prove irreversible for a long time.
Now see, here's what I'm wondering in all this. The mandatory Kinect meant a 10% overhead in the overall processing. That had to account for some of the sacrifices they've made to things like framerate and general performance, and I wonder if now they'll tweak things to reallocate that 10% where it's really needed. The Kinect is like a resource-intensive antivirus program, always in background, and I think anybody who's tried to game in the past with one of them knows what I'm talking about.
Kinect sucks for the most part. The microphone/voice command aspect of it is kind of cool for certain things. As far as games go... they never came up with anything good for the damned thing. Maybe they really really thought Kinect Sports Rivals would be an awesome showcase that got the casuals interested in parting with their $500. Now that its come out to zero hype and middling reviews they've finally given up. It's so weird how committed they were to the concept without ever coming up with a true 'killer app' across two generations of the thing.
The Kinect is far better suited for other, non-game applications anyways. Kinect input simply makes no proper sense for game controls. That's why there hasn't been a "killer app" for it.
MS is already talking to publishers about these available 10% power and how to utilize them, they've noticed. Because you need the controls to work perfectly 99.9% in a non-perfect environment (i.e. standard living room).. Kinect doesn't.
Nintendo can't do that because it would break every single game that has tablet-specific features. Besides, that wouldn't help move a lot more Wii Us.
John Lewis in the UK put the Wii U basic model on sale with a game for £119 this morning and sold out in less than half an hour. I think things like that prove that all the Wii U needs is a price cut.
Good to know. I'm curious to see where it will lead for them. Yeah, not to mention that doing so would bring them right back to square one. They'd likely have to abandon the hardcore gamers and focus on the casual users which were a big part of the success of the original Wii. The problem being, those users don't see a reason to upgrade from a Wii to a Wii U, and would need a compelling reason for doing so and Nintendo would have to do a far better job at marketing it than it did the first time around. It's a bit late in the game to be doing that though and would likely cost too much to try to rebuild momentum.
Mario Kart is getting pretty good reviews and will be out in a couple of weeks. C'mon Nintendo, cut your console price, advertise the shit out of Mario Kart and get some consoles out there. I mean, I already have mine, but I don't want the platform to up and die.
They may not be able to lower the price. I know that unusually for them, the Wii U was being sold at a loss; given their traditionally low attach rate, they can't necessarily count on game sales making that up if most people are only going to have 3-4 games (Mario Kart, Smash Brothers, and a Zelda or two).
Yeah, cutting the console price would just cost them more money. Their best bet is to cultivate the small (but hopefully loyal) following they have with the Wii U and try to get as many titles sold through as possible. The system is a failure in terms of market share as well as Nintendo's expectations. At this point, all they can do is damage control.
I know. I just want a Wii U for $199 and a controller that doesn't make my hands tired. At least the Pro Controller is pretty cool, but you have to buy it separately. All Nintendo can do at this point is slow their bleeding and hang on until the next generation. They have more than enough money in the bank and the 3DS is very profitable, so they won't be pulling a Sega any time soon. And given their modest sales forecast for 2014 (something like 3 million Wii Us world wide) even they have accepted this fate. Maybe this new Quality of Life stuff will work out for them. Who knows.
If I were Nintendo, I'd be pushing trailers onto the original Wii to show what people are missing by not getting a Wii U. Then again, lots of those never have connected it to the internet. If the console business doesn't work out for them anymore, there's always the playing cards they could go back to doing originally
Here are the NPD numbers for April taken from NeoGAF. Playstation 4: ~199k Xbox One: 115k 3DS: ~106k 360: 71k Wii U: ~49k PS3: 35k Wii: ~17-18k PSV: ~3.3k The poor, poor misunderstood Vita. Fortunately it's still selling well in Japan, but these horrible sales in North America means localizations of those quirky Japanese games that I love so much will be rare.
Even if they aren't 'number one' (or even number two) in the home console race at the moment, I've never doubted Nintendo's ability to weather the storm. We're emphatically not looking at a Sega situation here, where a series of high-profile blunders in the 1990s saw them destroy their strong market share, the mishandling of 32X, the Nomad and the Mega-CD created consumer apathy, while the Saturn and the Dreamcast were both great consoles but it was too little too late and Sega had already lost their customer base by then. They had no options left but to concede defeat. Nintendo are nowhere near that level of desperation yet. And we must remember, Nintendo have still got the hand-held market pretty much sewn up. Casual gamers have got their smartphones and tablets, but dedicated hand-held gamers still seem to overwhelmingly prefer 3Ds over Vita. Nintendo's problems with wii-U are basically the opposite of Microsoft's problems with Xbone: where Microsoft has basically screwed their in-house games development and instead throws money at other companies to develop exclusives for their console, Ninty haven't got a lot of outside development but their in-house games are as good as ever. The brands may be a little tired, but the games themselves are never less than Quality Products. And to be honest, I think Nintendo are the only company who truly innovate. Say what some might about them, they basically owned the last generation by leading the charge with motion control via the wii-mote (leaving Sony and MS to scramble for their own motion control setups), and even their current hardware strives to offer consumers a genuine alternative to the samey-samey hardware that their competitors provide. Xbone and PS4 are basically very similar consoles. wii-U and 3Ds are not like either of them. Its lesser hardware, yes, but the actual gaming experience is different with Nintendo. They're always offering people something the competitors don't, even if some of those ideas are so "out there" they constitute significant risk in the marketplace. I give them props for trying.
On the other hand, there's little sense in downplaying just what a dire situation this is for Nintendo. This is a company that hadn't reported a quarterly loss in 3 decades, and now they've posted losses for the past 2 years. The Wii U is a disaster for the company's financials. They have the cash to survive for a while, but they can't be complacent or they'll suffer SEGA's fate.