Übermatik;211762161 said:
I like to speculate about the behind-the-scenes workings of Nintendo at times like this. I'm starting to think that fusing portable and home devices together makes so much sense because a) it's something they've practiced many times in the past, b) have an opportunity to do so now more than ever (Nvidia needing a win, tech progression) and c) is something that, more interestingly, may detract from standard console lifetime procedure and the failure of the Wii U.
It'd be interesting to discover that Nintendo is seizing this opportunity to actually take a breather from the home hardware process and bide time for a more revised, concentrated effort 6 or so years down the line. The reason the console market is volatile is due to time constraints, from the consumers and the manufacturers. Nintendo may have bought themselves a lot of space.
Thoughts?
Nintendo is always tinkering with different hardware, but I have doubts they'll ever return to the traditional cutting edge hi spec home console. I imagine in the future they'll definitely tinker with AR or VR concepts, and the like.
I think what they are doing with the NX as rumored makes perfect sense for them, even if people have trouble seeing its place in the current market.
The central goal here for nintendo is creating a one stop shop for all the popular franchises that are associated with them across their handheld and home consoles, now in a single form factor.
The balance they're striking here with the hardware power, whether making use of the Tegra X1 or X2, is necessary to do this. Even if they made separate handheld and console products they would still need to be within similar power levels, or that would kind of defeat the intended production goal of a shared library (not having to create two versions of the same games to play to each hardware's strength.) That is why the hybrid approach makes sense.
The risks of making a powerful home console is that, if western third party did not jump entirely on board, nintendo is left with a high cost console that they are mostly supporting, versus a more attractively priced cheaper console that they are mostly supporting. The other risk here being that, if they are the ones mostly supplying software, a cutting edge console would lengthen production times and would become more expensive if they wanted to make proper use of the extra horsepower (look at Sony 1st party.)
So from a risk reward perspective, a situation where nintendo has the full brunt of their software teams working towards one product, in a pipeline that they are comfortable with and can be expedient with, the NX is one of the more sensible paths they could have taken.