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[Fragems]

Really I kind of wish Nintendo would shift their focus away from consoles and just dominate the hell out of the handheld market.

I also wouldn't mind Nintendo opening up a shop on PC really none of their games have really touched the PC market legitimately. So if they just open up a shop like Steam or Origin load up a bunch of modified emulators and sell the rights to your roms they'd be swimming in the cash. Nintendo really needs to get on the ball as far as virtual content goes things have improved quite a bit this gen with the Wii U and 3DS but they still feel like their at minimum a gen or two behind where they should be. Whatever their reasoning whether it be keeping the console safe for children or just hating money/success in general Nintendo has really dropped the ball as far as online support for their systems go.

[PartridgeSenpai]

I will add with the post that popped up before I finished this -- if Nintendo dropped out I think I'd just stop buying console games. My PS4 gets rare use, I'd sell off anything MS I was gifted and just stick with the computer as it has so many more choices of things gaming and beyond so why bother? It's a console, it's internet, it's business, it's pleasure, it's music, it's a damned museum of any sort of whatever crosses your mind and beyond. The PS4 and One are wannabe cloned up (90% so) multimedia boxes doing crap on your TV you can already do on a damned phone more or less for far less money and that's scary in itself.

I completely agree. Especially with how freaking expensive consoles are getting on launch, you can build a decent gaming PC with the 500-600 dollars you would spend on a launch console. I'm interested in a PS4 the same way I was in a 360: Barely at all. I waited until I could get the newest model for under a hundred bucks before I bought a 360, and it seems that I'll be doin' the same thing with the PS4 (unless I just wanna waste money on an Xbone I guess). Other than a small handful of exclusives that I can count on one hand, there's nothing on the PS4 that looks interesting that I can't just play on PC. The main reason I own a Wii U in the first place is because it genuinely has a fairly decent number of couch-co-op games that also aren't on PC at all. Depending on what the NX is, I very well may just never buy another gaming console (at least as we know consoles today).

[Exhuminator]

Really I kind of wish Nintendo would shift their focus away from consoles and just dominate the hell out of the handheld market.

That would be easy. Who's gonna challenge Nintendo for the right to pilot an ever shrinking life raft?

[PartridgeSenpai]

Really I kind of wish Nintendo would shift their focus away from consoles and just dominate the hell out of the handheld market.

That would be easy. Who's gonna challenge Nintendo for the right to pilot an ever shrinking life raft?

Even with the rise of mobile gaming, I think there will always be some sort of space for handheld games that use physical, built-in buttons. I don't personally care how powerful a tablet is: If it doesn't have buttons, I'll hate playing games on it (Bluetooth controllers aren't good enough). Similarly to how I think there will always be some sort of market space for a video games focused "console." Even if it's the Steam Machine sort of model where it's literally just a pre-assembled PC that you hook up to the television, there are always going to be people who don't want to go through the hassle of assembling their own PC, no matter how much more powerful it may or may not be.

[Exhuminator]

some sort of space for handheld games that use physical, built-in buttons. I don't personally care how powerful a tablet is: If it doesn't have buttons, I'll hate playing games on it

I agree with you about buttons. I'd even argue an exclusive platform makes for stronger games (but that's a long argument). The problem is, we're a fading breed, and there's not enough of us to keep the dedicated handheld market floating much longer. The 3DS and Vita did not live up to their predecessors' sales anywhere near what Nintendo and Sony had hoped. There's a very simple reason for that, and that reason has only grown bigger in the past few years.

[Tanooki]

"there are always going to be people who don't want to go through the hassle of assembling their own PC, no matter how much more powerful it may or may not be"

Yes, but have you tried setting up the latest consoles for the first time? Lots of wires, lots of load screens, lots of pre-installs and installs, lots of menus to dick with to get things going right, firmware pushes out of the gate right off. All this can take the average newbie hours to do, not much less for someone in the know who can bypass a piece here or there. And that's not even getting into the toss in the game, watch the 30min-3hr mega patch garbage going on now since games are late beta releases often these days with a line up of $60 paying guinea pigs for free testing.

"some sort of space for handheld games that use physical, built-in buttons. I don't personally care how powerful a tablet is: If it doesn't have buttons, I'll hate playing games on it "

A lot of people feel this way but even more do not. The rational argument here would not be to stick to a console, stick to a handheld, and hope things get better. They won't. I think the only long term viable market currently is what NVIDIA alone is doing with SHIELD. Step back a moment, and maybe if 1/2 the bullshit spun about the NX is any indication maybe Nintendo isn't too far gone into caving their head in their own crack. The Shield is a handheld (3DS), a tablet (kinda 3DS/WiiU controllerish), and a console too. All of them run a nearly stock version of Android with just the Shield HUB and media tools to jack it into a TV or a PC to stream, more or less, that's it. They all run the same crap across the board.

Supposedly NX runs NintendOS which Nintendo doesn't want to show off, yet rumor has it, those seeing it so far said it's like FireOS on Kindle, a cozy Nintendo semi-locked down coat of paint over Android. The other hot rumor was that NX is a scalable tech that looks to be both a handheld and a console (2 systems, a neo-geo x box with a dock, whatever) it's something. If this is true, and so is NintendOS, then you have a possible SHIELD situation going on. Games that are on little SD like cards or downloads to a box with a shared NNID account (like a google play account) for your shadow covered android device. Developers say you can as it is now take an android or other console game and drop it on NX with nearly no retooling other than Nintendo tech button/nomenclature standards and it works. Maybe Nintendo really did make their last strike at thriving survivability staked in the world of the growing market value of the android based microconsole. Shield is nothing to sneeze at, look at the games only allowed to be downloaded for it, they're around PS3/360 level of quality as it is, nothing to laugh at. Imagine a NX where if it's a handheld, it's like a shield tablet but not so much, with dedicated buttons ON IT like a GBA classic spread wide with a touch panel, but then you also get a console with a normal controller and a view panel on it (think WiiU) so you still can tablet away on or off tv play.

That would spookily fit the stories and would be I think the only shot they got left at growing and not floundering worse. People would flock to a Nintendo android platform because porting would be fast and dirt cheap. Those who would balk at that would be the cowards and scum who play fanboy games in the industry like that twat Mark Rein from EPIC who for years made up stupid arguments to rip on the company, or rockstar denying GTA games on their consoles but oddly being ok doing a GTA3 lite on GBA.

[PartridgeSenpai]

That's a fairly brilliant prediction actually, Tanooki. So it'd be something like what Sony tried to do with the Vita, where you can play basically all games on a tablet on and off the console. Off the console, it's a bit slimmed down in graphical fidelity, but near your console, it works basically like a SHIELD where it's just wirelessly streaming HDMI from the console box (Which I suppose you could just hook up to the television as well).

That would make sense for how they'd make a Zelda U port to each version as well, so frankly that's the best theory I've heard so far.

[Exhuminator]

frankly that's the best theory I've heard so far.

The unified architecture theory is nothing new. People started guessing that was going to be the case once Nintendo brought its handheld and console studios under the same roof. That happened back in 2013: http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/16/nint ... ext-month/

Not to dismiss anything Tanooki said, but the highlights of his spiel I've seen before in NeoGAF threads already. There are assloads of NX threads on NeoGAF full of patent papers and shareholder reports, with all of that information combed over in fine detail, coupled with healthy doses of speculation and guesswork. Tanooki did a nice job of congealing some of those ideas in his post above though.

The biggest thing I'm wondering about right now, is if the handheld NX will actually act as a supplementary computing device for the NX console. In tandem with shared offloading of computational crunching via networked partnered NX consoles. I can see how this method could improve system processing power, but at the same time would be a burden for developers considering they'd never know the full extent of their available system resources. I guess you could make your game based on 30fps, and if the end user gets above those fps using shared offloading more power to them.

[ElkinFencer10]

I'm just going to bury my head in the sand, buy whatever Nintendo releases, and hope that it's not a disaster.

[Sarge]

Well, the real irony is that we're going to get something similar if the rumored PS4/XB1 upgrades are true. Devs will need to support both platforms. Now, the question becomes: does the weaker console hold back the stronger one? Or will there be an easy contingency plan in place for that? Time will tell.

Me, personally, I'd love it if it were like the Wii U, but able to unchain the Gamepad from the system. Portable and console. I guess the biggest speculation will be if the portable actually comes with the system, whether it is the system, or is a separate release from the console.

We all know I'll buy it. I mean, I own a Wii U, and I've gotten enough great games out of it to have justified the purchase. This generation, even if it fails, will likely end up the same.