
Nintendo may be withdrawing from making standard games like its console rivals, but it still has to go up against them for your gaming pounds, dollars and yen. To make its next-gen console, Revolution (not the final name), more attractive to you and gamers the world over, Nintendo is aiming to again bring its hardware in at a lower price.
“Value has been a key card for us this generation and we’ll continue to play it,” Nintendo’s Reggie Fils-Aime told CNN this week. “Do I expect us to be at a lower price point than our competition? Yes I do. Have we determined a price yet? No we haven’t.”
Not only that. Nintendo has learned from the design mistakes made with the GameCube. While the boxy, purple (or black) console did well with kids, the family friendly design gave the console a toy-like appearance, especially when compared to the sleek lines of the PlayStation and the brawny Xbox.
Fils-Aime concedes that aesthetics go hand in hand with solid games, especially in the console’s early days:
“I think there were some lessons we learned with the GameCube that we need to apply to the Revolution.”
“First, we’ve got make sure that the titles in the first six months are strong and can drive sales. We’ve also got to make sure the console is attractive visually. And we’ve got to deliver on the right consumer needs. With GameCube, at the time, portability was thought to be a big factor – that’s why it has a handle. Obviously, that wasn’t the case.”
Nintendo’s current bellwether console is the DS, which is doing well thanks to excellent games, in spite of its clunky appearance. Here too the company is going to neaten things up a bit, with Fils-Amie hinting to CNN that a redesign was already being worked on.
“As soon as [the DS] was launched, we started looking at ways to tweak it visually,” he said.
The revelations weren’t all good, though. With high definition TVs going into more and more homes now, there’s pressure on companies to deliver HD content. Sony and Microsoft are already using HD resolutions as standard in their games, but Nintendo seems it will lag behind.
Fils-Aime insists, though, that when you sit down to play a Revolution game, you’ll forget all about HD.
I’m not a gamer; but, I might have said something like that about HDTV — before I started watching HDTV, regularly. Now, with the exception of favorite sports and a couple of mysteries that haven’t made the upgrade, yet, I just don’t watch SDTV, anymore.















Sell the console for the least amount of money… Make the highest percentage of profit…
This is something Nintendo has always done very well.
Worst … controllers … evar.
Ugh.
All my TVs are HDTV and all my receivers are HDTV. The channels I watch, most of them are still SDTV. What is the difference? When you’re watching the news, its not important how many more pixels there are or if you can see the beautiful details. With DVDs they are still not HD quality, and I can’t tell the difference. I think this HDTV stuff is all bullsh*t. My computer monitor has more pixels than my TVs do, but I need that for more productivity or viewable space. When it comes to movies, or shows, people with SDTV see what I see, just at a lower resolution. Besides you’re not suppose to sit two feet in front of the TV.
I’ve always wondered about the strategy of “do all” game consoles that play DVDS or surf the web. As for me, I’d rather have a machine dedicated to games, and that’s it. That should save them some money.
Oh, I want to add…
CORDLESS controllers. That’s the design feature to add.
In my opinion, ugly cords are the worst part about game machines. They make the living room look like a mess.
The console should fit nicely next to the TV and the controllers should be quick and easy to stash when company drops in.
Wouldn’t bluetooth make this an easy feature to add?
All three next-gen consoles will use cordless controllers.
>>All three next-gen consoles will use cordless controllers.
Great! Now if I could just have a cordless home computer. Mine is an amazing tangle of wires… a total mess with dozens of cords.
Nintendo was the first company to offer first party controllers with out cords.
As far as worst controller ever… Is that why every controller on every modern system can be traced back to Nintendo? http://www.axess.com/twilight/console/