[EddieE]

The thing about Nintendos current, Wii/DS era strategy, is it is unsustainable and they know it.
 
Yeah, they made a truck load of money off console sales for both system, but the casual gamers who bought them were happy with Dr Kawashimas brain training and Wii sports and never got into buying software reguarly.
 
I think that big influx of mums and grannys and girlfriends who got into those systems have gone through that phase and they don't seem to be jumping over to kinect or move in droves.
 
Nintendo rode that wave with skill, now its time for them to look at what the next big thing will be.
 
What I am imagining now is quite different to my original speculation, but similar in other ways too.
 
The 6 inch screen thing - this is basically a tablet - so they are trying to jump on the ipad thing. The streaming to controller thing I don't think will be a main feature but just something you can do if you like. I think the touch screen will be a second screen, and in some cases a controller.
 
Due to the size of the screen, I imagine there being just a very thin strip of real estate either side. An analogue stick roughly centre (ergonically the best place from holding a postcard about the right size) of each side with a d pad above the left one and start/home buttons below, on the right two hardware buttons above and below. With bumpers and triggers on back (the form of which would also work like kickstand) this would be perfect for FPS games as the face buttons tend to be secondary functions anyway with the sticks and triggers the main controls.
 
Nintendo must realise they NEED TO BE FRIENDLY FOR fps games as these are the biggest sellers out there. Another big one, fighting games, would not be so supported by this format, but most enthusiasts would have fight sticks and the touch screen would offer plenty of space for an on screen series of buttons that would be big enough to work.
 
So you'd have a tablet controller that could be used as a main screen or a secondary screen/secondary control mechanism, but could also have all of the offline functionality I spoke of above.
 
Nintendo would then try (and I predict miserably fail) to make this an ipad competitor with wifi, web browser, iplayer, youtube stuff that they would be too controlling with and probably wouldn't work.
 
For me, I am cynical but not hopeless about Nintendo.
 
I'm old enough to remember fondly the days of the NES and SNES when Nintendo still did their nintendo thing but had massive third party support and hardcore gaming galore.
 
That was possible because the Nintendo pads did not demdand a certain kind of game play. While the Wii drastically restricted what developers could do and forced them to make games with motion gimmicks, a touch screen would open things up to let developers do more, and what I am now speculating would be perfect for FPS games which are the mainstay of gaming these days.
 
All pointless speculation I know, but hey, I love speculating!

 

[marvin]

 
Quote:

The thing about Nintendos current, Wii/DS era strategy, is it is unsustainable and they know it.
 
Yeah, they made a truck load of money off console sales for both system, but the casual gamers who bought them were happy with Dr Kawashimas brain training and Wii sports and never got into buying software reguarly.

 
Nonsense. If Nintendo believed that their strategy is unsustainable, they wouldn't have made the 3DS. Other than a ~ $10 parallax barrier, there's nothing remotely leading edge about the 3DS. And if the Wii2 console hardware rumors are true, there's nothing leading edge there either. The GPU rumors are especially revealing. The X360's Xenos unit was based on ATI's latest and greatest architecture with features incorporated from ATI's next generation architecture. The PS3's RSX unit was based on nVidia's latest and greatest architecture. The rumored Wii2's GPU architecture (based on ATI's R700) will be two generations out of date on launch, likely three or four generations out of date by the time the PS360 successors roll out.
 
And the idea that the Wii/DS didn't sell software is patently absurd. The Wii had sold nearly 700 million units of software world wide by the end of 2010, handily beating the X360 and almost doubling up on the PS3. The DS did even better, selling over 800 million units of software by the end of 2010. Sure the Wii/DS attach rates aren't as good as the X360 and PS3, but they're not much worse and the Wii/DS both have monster advantages in userbase.

 
Quote:

Nintendo must realise they NEED TO BE FRIENDLY FOR fps games as these are the biggest sellers out there. Another big one, fighting games, would not be so supported by this format, but most enthusiasts would have fight sticks and the touch screen would offer plenty of space for an on screen series of buttons that would be big enough to work.

 
 
Other than CoD, FPS/TPS games really don't sell that well and get more love from the enthusiast press than their marketshare would indicate. Mario Kart Wii sold about as many units as Halo 3, ODST, Reach, Gears 1, and Gears 2 combined. Mario Kart DS sold more units than Resistance 1, Resistance 2, Killzone 2, Killzone 3, Uncharted 1, and Uncharted 2 combined. While FPS/TPS support would be great, it isn't nearly as critical as you make it out to be.
 
And fighting games are pretty niche these days. Even Street Fighter 4, by far the best selling fighter of the generation, failed to break 5 million.

 

[EddieE]

Come on man, the casual gamers are bored already. I know a dozen people who never had a video games system before and bought a Wii or a DS and they all have the game they bought with it, maybe at most one more. The gamers who bought it have been frustrated by the lack of quality games and have mostly bought Xboxes or PS3s by now. People who own Xboxes and PS3s buy games regularly.
 
The Wii has been brilliant for Nintendo financially but they must realise it is time to get off the wave before it crashes. The actual gaming market are the core gamers, they aren't going anywhere and they aren't interested in the Wii. Contiuing to plan as though the millions of new video game converts who bought the Wii are here to stay would be suicidally optimistic and I think Nintendo know they need to cater to the core again.
 
Nintendo bought out the 3DS - yeah - it is a more graphically powerful system with a bunch of new abilities for game playing than the DS so will appeal to gamers more, it will also soon support viewing 3D movies which you'd otherwise need to invest a lot in a home system to do so - that's aiming at a whole new market and isn't just treading the touch screen - it's not even talking much about the fact that it has a touch screen or selling that as the main mechanism for control any more.
 
Of course Mario Kart has sold a lot, you know why - because LOADS of people have Wiis and hardly any games come out on it. Pretty much everyone who has a Wii has it as its one of the only good games to buy. It's not a statistic that tells you karting games are the where the industry should go instead of FPS.
 
If there are that many more Wiis out there than 360s or PS3s then of course there will be higher sales of Wii games. That tells you nothing. You have to look at games sales as a percentage of console owners though and I'd be interested to see those figures. I only have anecdotal evidence to go on but the people I know who have Wiis have one to three games, that's all they've ever owned and its all they'll ever own. The people who own 360s and PS3s buy a game a month at least. I'd also be pretty confident that in the top ten selling games for the last few years the most represented genre would be FPS games, I'd be surprised if at least three games from that genre weren't in the top ten this year. 
 
As for the comments that the next gen PS3 and Xbox 360 will be better - in Sony's case they haven't really made money on their current systems. Sony and MS have put their move and kinect things out to try and sustain the lifespan of their current consoles because they know that creating a system significantly more powerful would be completely commerically unviable right now. They may do it anyway, but whether it is really good for them to do so is another question altogether.

 

[IPodPJ]

Quote:

I cant see the 'porting the consoles output to the controller' idea working. I think they would more likely use it as a secondary screen for extra functionality alongside the main screen.

 
Sure.  One area where this could come in handy is if you are playing multiplayer games, lets say with 4 people, and 2 of you are on one team and the other 2 are on another team.  Each team could exchange secret strategies and commands between team members without the other team seeing it on the main TV screen.
 
 

 

[EddieE]

Quote:

 
Sure.  One area where this could come in handy is if you are playing multiplayer games, lets say with 4 people, and 2 of you are on one team and the other 2 are on another team.  Each team could exchange secret strategies and commands between team members without the other team seeing it on the main TV screen.
 
 

Depending on what the console can manage, it could have a lot of applications - a rear view mirror in a driving game, an alternate camera angle, radar etc. The DS touched on a lot of this stuff already of course but as you say having a "secret" element when friends are playing against each other on the main screen is a great idea. As its touch screen it could act as a much quicker way to access pause screen options in-game without breaking flow as well.
 
If the console has the power to run one screen on the TV and port out a whole different screen to the touch screen, the options are really limitless.
 
I am still hoping they work a lot of offline functionality into this as well.

 

[Infoseeker]

Quote:

 
Sure.  One area where this could come in handy is if you are playing multiplayer games, lets say with 4 people, and 2 of you are on one team and the other 2 are on another team.  Each team could exchange secret strategies and commands between team members without the other team seeing it on the main TV screen.
 
 

Alas! Play whilst you dump! ;D
 

 

[IPodPJ]

Quote:

Alas! Play whilst you dump! ;D

And this could be huge for siblings.  Mom says TURN THE LIGHTS OUT AND GO TO BED! and you and your brother/sister in different rooms continue to play your game together.
 

 

[EddieE]

Just for fun, my shoddy artist's impression of what I'm currently speculating...
 

 

[Kirosia]

Eddie, I think you should listen to what Marvin says... he's right... pretty much always.
 
Anyways, I don't think they'd have such an "expensive" controller, they're current ones aren't particularly that fancy yet still cost a hand-and-foot ($60 for a combination of nunchuck, remote, and classic controller... yet I can't even use it to play GC games?). Imagine what a replacement next-gen controller would cost the consumer...

 

[EddieE]

I'm just having a bit of fun trying to play a guessing game with what's been leaked about it. I understand the chances of it being anything like I'm imagining are next to nothing. I remember in the run up to the Wii the internet was awash with this big guessing games and artists impressions based on little bits and pieces Nintendo had fed, and the end result was nothing like what anyone had imagined. But the guessing game was as fun as the reveal, for me anyway.
 
Regarding them not having an expensive controller... well I'm basing my guesses on what's in the public realm. What's out there is it has 6 inch screen, dual analogue sticks and d pad, front mounted camera, bumper and trigger buttons... That's a pretty expensive controller right there. If those leaks are true then a large part of the cost of the system will  be the controller itself, and a large part of how it is used will centre around it. 
 
EDIT: You could be thinking about this all wrong. A console is expensive, do people worry about what a replacement console costs when they buy one? An ipod is expensive, a 3DS, an ipad. You're assuming that just because it is a controller it has to be cheaper and throw away. Why?
 
Whoever is leaking is credible enough for IGN to be using terms like "confirmed" about the screen alone. Maybe someone inside Nintendo or one of the major developers working with them thinks making a fool out of  the world's biggest video games site to spread a red herring about the system will bode well for the future of their company, I don't know. For now it seems more likely that what's been leaked is at least very close to what will transpire.
 
Marvin, meanwhile, is expressing an opinion about the direction Nintendo will go with games, and I'm expressing an opinion, and they don't match. That's hardly unusual or a big deal.
 
The mainstream who bought the Wii are bored, maybe a generation later someone can reel them in again, but the real gaming market is much smaller, they are the ones staying and if Nintnedo are smart that's who they'll target. That's my opinion, wrong or right, it's worth as much as anyone elses.
 
EDIT 2:
 
I also want to make clear I've never said Nintendo themselves as a software developer will stop making their style of games. They wont and I personally don't want them to. I am pointing out that in the days on the NES and SNES you had your nintendo games but you also had every other type of game because they had total third party support. That was because there were no limits to third party support, no partiuclar channel Nintendo tried to funnell them down like with the Wii. No hardware limitations compared to the competitors like the last two and partly three generations of Nintendo consoles. They should be looking to return to that. 
 

 

[EddieE]

Another variation...
 

 

[EddieE]

I do have to say though, just seeing predicted prices coming out, it's very hard to reconcile the 6 inch screen thing with the prices quoted...
 
Edit - scratch that its just some "expert" speculating.
 
More - possible leaked pictures? Or rubbish... Could very well be faked ... it looks a lot like a pretty standard controller with a screen shoved in the middle.  That thing must either be ENORMOUS or not have six inch screen...
 

I'm almost certain this is fake anyway....
 
Another EDIT:
 
 
Sorry I know I'm sort of turning this thread into a blog of my specuation, but I'm going to continue.
 
Nintendo should have two aims for this console - to recapture the core gaming market now the casual gaming trend is dying down, and to tap a new market.
 
Look around and you'll see the mainstream are completely engaged in gadets - name smart phones (most notably the iPhone of course) and tablets (again, mostly the ipad) seem to be gaining traction.
 
People of all ages and genders are completely engaged in their worlds on these mini computers and I think Nintendo are trying to create a gaming equivalent. This speculation is built heavily on the 6 inch screen rumour, if that falls, the whole chain of speculation falls. A six inch screen is a small tablet. No way to ignore that.
 
In terms of controller expense - two things:
 
First this will, as it almost always is with Nintendo, be a new concept. The controller and the console will be the two things you are paying for when you buy the system. That is not to say that you won't be able to get cheap classic controllers which are perfectly capable of joining in, but the pad will be the deep experience and will not be a throwaway accessory to the console that needs to be cheap. Rather it will be core to the experience and very personal to the owner of the console.
 
Second is that we have to remember what is being proposed here: The pad STREAMS the gaming content form the console - it's a receiver. It is not an all powerful gaming machine although I really hope, and will be incredibly disapointed if it is not as powerful itself as a modest smart phone at least. So still an expensive bit of gear, but not as expensive to manufacture as a 3DS let alone an NGP. EDIT : It would still be kind of cool but ultimtely disapointing if all it did was stream, some kind of basic ability to use the tablet offline would really make the console something special.
 
With those two points in mind... Project Cafe.
 
Nintendo Wii had the code name Revolution. It did what it said on the tin - attempted and in some measures succeeded in revolutionising gaming. It was a completely new idea, a whole new take on gaming.
 
Project Cafe could be just a random made up name. But it does fit very well with the image of hipsters with their ipads in cafes involved in their little worlds.
 
I believe the controller will be smart phone sort of level of power when not streaming from the console. It'll have wifi, a web browser, chat, store the avatar of the player and their profile and a lot of off line functionality with games. That'll be up to the manufacturers. It could be unrelated throwaway mini games based on the main game concept, it could be opportunities to plan complex strategies you can take in to the game, it could be a chance to practice the inputs of moves and combos - a lot of potential for developer creativity and also to keep people invested in their gaming experience away from the console. I'd like to predict Nintendo will get this right, but I think it will more likely be mixed success and far too limited.
 
So that's my guess. As I said above there is a much higher chance I'll be completely wrong than completely right and I reserve my right to change my mind infinite times, but that's where I was going with the tablet style design.
 
One other thing, I have neither the skill nor patience to photoshop this, but I speculate the underside being wedge shaped, so the pad stands up a bit like on a kickstand when layed on a table. This would be to accomodate the trigger buttons, but would also be a kind of cool feature for its offline life as a tablet.

 

[marvin]

Quote:

Come on man, the casual gamers are bored already. I know a dozen people who never had a video games system before and bought a Wii or a DS and they all have the game they bought with it, maybe at most one more. The gamers who bought it have been frustrated by the lack of quality games and have mostly bought Xboxes or PS3s by now. People who own Xboxes and PS3s buy games regularly.
 
...
 
If there are that many more Wiis out there than 360s or PS3s then of course there will be higher sales of Wii games. That tells you nothing. You have to look at games sales as a percentage of console owners though and I'd be interested to see those figures.

 
 
The number you're looking for to quantify your speculation is called the attach (or tie) rate. Fortunately, NPD released their US estimates for those at the end of 2010. The X360 attach rate was 8.8 units/console, the PS3 attach rate was 7.6 units/console, and the Wii attach rate was 7.2 units/console. While the Wii clearly lags behind its competitors, it doesn't lag the PS3 by much and the X360 has a full year on it. The actual numbers are a far cry from the usual "core" gamer perception that Wii console owners only buy one or two games. By the way, the DS had an attach rate of ~ 5 units/console. Not quite up there with the big boys, but very respectable for a handheld console.
 
Regarding market momentum, both the Wii and DS clearly had a down year in 2010. While that might signal that casual gamers are disenchanted with gaming, I kind of doubt that. I mean, Microsoft managed to ship 10 million Kinect units (a product roundly despised by "core" gamers) in six months. That's a lot of units (equal to ~ 20% of the X360 install base) considering the rather weak launch lineup. Rather, it's more likely that both consoles were/are software starved while Nintendo was/is busy prepping for the 2010 3DS and 2011 Wii2 launches.
 
Quote:

Of course Mario Kart has sold a lot, you know why - because LOADS of people have Wiis and hardly any games come out on it. Pretty much everyone who has a Wii has it as its one of the only good games to buy. It's not a statistic that tells you karting games are the where the industry should go instead of FPS.

 
 
That's really not a bad idea. I mean, if the Wii is so software starved that a great family friendly, competitive multiplayer title can rack up 20+ million sales, there's likely some fertile ground there for game development. Certainly beats pouring tens of millions of dollars into an FPS/TPS only to be crushed by the CoD juggernaut. But that'd require getting publishers and developers out of their tiny comfort zone which isn't going to happen any time soon.
 
 
Quote:

As for the comments that the next gen PS3 and Xbox 360 will be better - in Sony's case they haven't really made money on their current systems. Sony and MS have put their move and kinect things out to try and sustain the lifespan of their current consoles because they know that creating a system significantly more powerful would be completely commerically unviable right now. They may do it anyway, but whether it is really good for them to do so is another question altogether.

 
Microsoft has started system architecture for their next generation console and I suspect Sony isn't far off from the same point. That puts the releases for those consoles out to the 2013/2014 time frame. Even if both manufacturers go the conservative route with hardware (unlikely but possible), they'll still be two hardware generations more advanced than the Wii2.
 
 
Quote:

It is not an all powerful gaming machine although I really hope, and will be incredibly disapointed if it is not as powerful itself as a modest smart phone at least. So still an expensive bit of gear, but not as expensive to manufacture as a 3DS let alone an NGP.

 
Prepare to be incredibly disappointed. You're talking iTouch class hardware, and bill of materials cost for those run north of $100. Might as well use 3DS units as controllers at that point.

 

[EddieE]

Marvin,
Maybe the market is radically different where you live, I'm just going by what I see - the casual gamers who got into Wiis and DS aren't interested anymore. They aren't going to follow Nintendo into a second system - they already have a Wii in their cupboard they can take out for party games. That's what I see with my and my friends mums, sisters, girlfriends. Tell them a new Nintendo console is coming out and they glaze over. They aren't gamers and they never were. 
 
As for the controller - I'm pretty prepared to be disapointed on the offline functionality side of things - I think if Nintendo is going to put out this expensive controller, just having it stream content and be inert once you turn the console off is a waste. But there are no announcements of any kind relating to offline use - it's entirely me saying what I'd like to happen and therefore not all that likely really.
 
The notion that the thing has a six inch touch screen is as close to confirmed as can be without a Nintendo announcement. Either multiple large game developers are playing a hoax on the world gaming press - or that is a fact - as is the fact that it streams content from the console, has analogue sticks, bumper buttons and trigger buttons. The face mounted camera is less corroborated from what I've read, but all of these leaks come from developers working with the dev kits - it's more than just rumour. The fact that it will be usable as a sensor bar for a wiimote (probably for backwards compatibility alone IMO) is something IGN talk of as though fact as well.
 
The bottom line is - global hoax aside - it's GOING to be an expensive controller, but I would predict that classic controllers will still work for many games, certainly for game modes like multiplayer. There is no avoiding the fact that this is a very different model to the controller being seen as a throwaway accessory, but will be a much larger proportion of the console you pay for than has been traditional with consoles.
 
I'm not just making this stuff up...
 
EDIT: And I'm not actually referring to ipod touch class hardware - I said a modest smart phone, not a top of the line one - it could even be less powerful than a run of the mill smart phone and handle most of the functionality I'm envisioning. Wifi is the most unrealistic part of what I'd be envisioning, cost wise, as even the cheapest phones with it seem to be £60 odd. Take that away and it's only a small extra investment on top of what has already been near-confirmed. A micro SD slot or a small amount of inbuilt memory and a very basic processor of Gameboy advance sort of power. Do you know I can walk into HMV and get a little handheld Megadrive/Genesis toy with 20+ games loaded on it for £15? Perhaps it won't happen, I just think it would be a wasted opportunity not to give this something to do away from the console.

 

[EddieE]

Re. them being ahead of, therefore behind, the Sony and MS offerings - well there are two very different precedents to look at.
 
Dreamcast came out early, but a massive hype campaign from Sony on what the PS2 could do (which turned out to be pretty much barefaced lies) stopped people investing in it and it died. 
 
The other is Xbox, which is a less powerful than the PS3. It's early start was a big success and this has led to a situation where PS3 games seldom look better than Xbox versions as they are developed in parallel anyway. Sony are now third in the market and don't make anything off console sales as they can't can't get away with selling it for what its worth. 
 
So it's not as cut and dried to say Nintendo WILL fail getting there early - it's certainly a risk - but there is precedent for that model failing and succeeding.