Another day, another leak (or supposed leak) concerning the Nintendo NX. In this case, an unverified poster to the NX reddit forum is claiming that the machine is "slightly above the power of the PS4." Others in the subreddit have pointed out some discrepancies in the original poster's comments that could indicate the entire thread is bogus -- or might imply that the person in question simply doesn't know the hardware specs very well.
There's been a tremendous amount of chatter around the Nintendo NX these last few months and reports continue to swirl that Nintendo has slashed Wii U production after sales in Japan collapsed this year.
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Wii U sales have cratered in Japan, the one market where it showed some faint signs of life. Q1 is always the worst period for console sales, but the Wii U's reported performance to-date is bad, even by Q1 standards. It's even worse if you compare global sales. Nintendo may or may not have pulled the plug just yet, but we suspect the fall-off in Wii U sales is going to decide it for them quickly (and not in a positive direction).
What can Nintendo build?
Just as the Wii U offered roughly the same horsepower as the Xbox 360 and PS3 (albeit with a more advanced GPU), there's no reason the Nintendo NX can't match the performance of the existing Xbox One and PS4. Questions like this ultimately come down to cost, form factor, and noise level. Historically, Nintendo has chosen to build small, quiet systems with hardware performance ranging from roughly on par with its rivals to roughly one generation behind. The Wii U was built on 40nm process technology at a time when 28nm was already readily available because Nintendo wanted to save money. Total main memory bandwidth is 12.8GB/s, nearly an order of magnitude lower than the Xbox One, and games have just 1GB of memory to work with.
In short, the reason the Wii U has roughly the same performance as a last-gen console (with some notable exceptions), is because Nintendo made design decisions that used last-gen technology. There's an important lesson here: One reason the Wii U's gamepad never took off the way motion controller titles did is because many Nintendo games are best when used for local multiplayer -- and the limited horsepower of the Wii U simply couldn't handle multiple simultaneous gamepads (at least not without compromising game performance). The idea of a portable gaming tablet that you carry around your house while tethering to a larger system is something we've seen both Shield and Steam explore, but they rely on substantially more horsepower to back up the capability than the Wii U offers.
There's been a great deal of speculation about the NX's hardware -- is it x86 or ARM, is it AMD or IBM, does it use a GCN or Polaris GPU? All of this is interesting, but it's not what will decide the shape or function of the console. If Nintendo wants to build a PS4-equivalent in 2016, it can obviously do so -- Sony, after all, built a PS4 in 2012 and shipped it in 2013.Does the NX bet on gimmicks or firepower?
Instead of taking yet another trip through hypothetical capabilities, I'd like to reframe the NX discussion around a different idea. The past two cycles have been won and lost based on whether or not the platform in question centered around a gimmick or simply provided more firepower.
The Wii and Wii U bet on gimmicks, as did the Xbox One with Kinect. Sony bet on firepower with both the PS4 and PS3, as did the Xbox 360. The PS3 arguably lost that fight (at least as far as total revenue across the lifespan of the console), because Sony took such a shattering loss on the platform in the beginning that we're not sure the PS3 was a net earning's positive for the entire time it spent as a leading-edge console.
Given that the PS4's estimated cost in 2013 was a bit over $300, it's entirely reasonable to think that Nintendo could build a PS4-equivalent in the Nintendo NX today. But based on even the limited facts we've heard from corporate, we know that the company is doubling down on the controller design and wants to field a "hybrid" platform.
The NX controller photos that surfaced last week were fakes; this patent drawing remains the only imagery we have to go on.
Gimmicks don't have to eat the console's R&D budget, but they need to be cheap if they aren't going to overwhelm total costs. Microsoft boasted that Kinect 2 cost almost as much as the Xbox One to develop -- and when gamer's turned out to hate Kinect 2, the end result was an underpowered console relative to the competition. As curious as we are about the Nintendo NX's various specs, what's going to ultimately drive its capabilities is how much cash Nintendo devoted to its hybrid controller concept, whatever that might be, and whether or not the company insisted on its previous $250 - $300 target with launch-day hardware profitability, or if Nintendo decided to be daring in of those areas.
The Nintendo NX will probably put more emphasis on firepower this generation, because the failure of the Wii U was partly a sign that Nintendo had let a little too much space open between itself and the competition. Even if Sony and MS deliver new, more powerful iterations of their own hardware, an NX that targets the PS4 will still be a suitable platform for third-party game development. The company obviously wants a design that will help it stand out from the crowd, but hopefully it chooses to do that while simultaneously acknowledging that HDTVs are common now and people expect higher resolution targets and detail levels from console hardware -- even if the company behind the console has a suite of first-party IP best described as "iconic."
