Wii outsells Wii U in December in US
Oh dear. Gamecube all over again?
Sobering thought: 3DS XL, and the issue of handhelds
So, it was an innocuous tweet:
Who’s thinking about getting a 3DS XL, then? Out tomorrow in the UK. And I like it a lot more than the original model. ttp://is.gd/bWmlKF
But it got me thinking: why would I?
Let’s do a quick breakdown here. A 3DS XL is around £180-£200. For this, according to Wikipedia, you get an ARM CPU clocked at around 233MHz, 128MB of FCRAM, 2GB of storage (SD expandable), and two screens, one with a 400x240 4.88” display in autostereoscopic 3D, and another 4.2” display that’s a 320x240 single input resistive touch screen. Typical battery life for heavy use? 3-4 hours tops.
My current phone, a nigh-2 years old iPhone 4, has a Cortex-A4 CPU clocked somewhere between 866MHz and 1GHz, 512MB of eDRAM, 16GB of storage, and a 960x640 3.5” capacitative multi-touch display. Heavy usage makes the battery drain in around 5 hours.
Yes, my phone is worth more. Here is the rub, however:
This is the Ainol Novo 7 Elf II 7” Android tablet. It has a dual core 1.5GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage expandable by MicroSD cards, and a 1024x600 7” multi-touch screen. It is also… £88. It has a 7 hour battery life under heavy load.
Don’t like unbranded? £20 less than the 3DS XL is the 8GB version of Google’s lovely new Nexus 7 tablet. That’s a quad core Tegra 3 CPU running at 1.2GHz, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage, and a 1280x800 IPS LCD 7” multi-touch display. 8 hours of battery life, too. Oh, and £15 of store credit, and a free film.
All of the three non-Nintendo devices share some great features; fast CPUs, great displays, multifunctional apps, multi-touch displays, and cheap software. And for those who want to say “but it misses that Nintendo magic”:
Baldur’s Gate will be on all 3 by the end of the year. There are many free iOS and Android games just as lovely and quirky. There are games by Square Enix, EA, Activision, and many other big studios.
It’s no wonder handheld sales have dropped so far so fast; they just aren’t trying to keep up, at all.
cnbc:
The Inside Story on the Making of Nintendo’s Wii U
Judging by the lines at Nintendo’s E3 booth, Nintendo’s Wii U is a hit, but the system could have been a lot different if Nintendo had listened to its inner demons. Global President Satoru Iwata says the idea of a two-screen, video game system was something the company went back and forth on—and didn’t finalize until nearly a year and a half into the development process.
Work on the Wii U began in 2008—one year after the Wii hit retail shelves and began to take over the videogame industry. But there was much internal debate before the schematics were finalized.
Photo: Nintendo
Hardcore gamers tend not to like gimmicky approaches like the original Wii or the Wii U, especially when the entire console is built around it, but think Nintendo has a hit on their hands here?
Having followed all of E3:
No.
The problem Nintendo have is they have many, many issues.
- It’s going to cost, a lot. Even though they’ve kept that controller, that 6” touch screen plus normal controls controller, as cheap as possible (at least I hope so - more on that below), estimates put it in the £300 mark, easy. It might not seem a lot, but a Wii right now is £130 and doesn’t sell. The hardware, sadly, isn’t enough right now to justify the added cost, and many people already have what they want in the Wii. The hardcore, well, they don’t want one anyway.
- That controller. It’s got a 3-5 hour battery life, takes 2 1/2 hours to charge, and is a resistive single input screen. Great for stylus control, awful for anything needing more than one finger at a time - like, say, Cut the Rope, or indeed 90% of mobile apps. So, they won’t be getting ported. Plus, it’s bulky.
- It also makes that player a pariah. Nintendo are selling this as “asynchronous multiplayer”, ie one player works different to the others. In reality, in a few examples given, it plain doesn’t look fun to be the player lumbered with it.
- It, again, lacks major third party support. EA are contributing one game - a port of Mass Effect 3 - and Activision are utterly ignoring the system. Ubisoft, as ever, have a lot of announced games - but many look generic, with only one real standout - Zombi U, an oddly hardcore game.
- Actual in game comparison footage between 360/PS3 and WiiU versions of Batman Arkham City show that the system is, well, not very powerful at all, despite being supposedly better than either. Textures look blurry, there’s a ton of screen tear… it just doesn’t bode well for the graphical power of it.
- The biggest reason the hardcore don’t care is they know that Microsoft and Sony are releasing their next generation machines next year. If the rumours are true, they’ll be significantly more powerful than WiiU, which is barely matching the current generation.
- Of all the years to release, this is the worst. People are financially squeezed in the big 3 console markets - US, Japan, UK - and won’t be willing to spend without tangible difference. Look at the lukewarm reaction to 3DS at launch (buoyed only by a massive price cut) and the Vita’s awful sales (it’s selling less than its predecessor the PSP in Japan week on week) for evidence people just don’t want gaming hardware right now.
Overall, they have a perfect storm: an expensive gimmicky machine that’s indistinguishable from its far cheaper contemporaries.
E3: what we know of the Big 3 now
So, the important bit of E3 is over: the console platform owners have spoken, and shown their path into the future. What have we learned?
This could possibly be the best E3 ever.
So, very soon, the games industry will be as usual fixated on the annual circus that is E3. This year, though, they’ll have good reason to do so.
A second Xmas for gamers: Why E3 matters
This time next Monday, I’ll be sat in this chair, staring intently at the screen. I’ll be watching probably 3 liveblogs at the same time, tabbing between browser pages to ensure I don’t miss anything. And the day after, and probably the day after that. Why? Because it’s E3 again, and that matters.
