Nintendo’s WiiWare channel is reported to be doing well (says Nintendo) and their Virtual Console games continue to invoke nostalgic downloads. Now, as Networked based gaming slowly starts to crawl on the console Nintendo has begun to realize they’re going to hit some storage issues.
The 512MB of internal flash memory is a bit lacking, especially considering you can purchase a 2GB flash drive for under USD $50.00 in todays market. While Sony and Microsoft work to increment their disk capacities in 20GB intervals Nintendo’s still trying to figure out how to solve their internal storage issues.
Although we initially heard that geeks would be the ones to hit the storage limitations Nintendo’s North American President and COO is readily admitting the pending issue, “we have a consumer base who loves virtual console. We have a userbase who really is enjoying WiiWare content. So for us really our challenge really is how do we satisfy all these consumers who are loving all of the product we make available on a download basis?”
The challenge in being a Japanese based company is understanding how American users consume your product. We’re much more likely to download content and spend money on products we’ve purchased 20 years ago. This is why we’ve got an American based Nintendo HQ to understand the ways of American thinking and trending.
While Nintendo Europe’s Europe’s Laurent Fischer sees only “geeks and otaku” utilizing the minimal disk capcity we here in the States can consume this space overnight. Imagine if we had downloadable content for Rock Band or Guitar Hero to pull down and play!?
As this becomes, as Reggie put it, a “mainstream problem” Nintendo is going to find their harder core demographic moving to other consoles that do it right and allow for expandability. There is a reason, after all, the other consoles cost a bit more to buy.
(Thanks, IGN)
I saw the Hollywood Medium episode featuring Cory Feldman with Tyler Henry discussing Corey Haim, and I anticipate his related, upcoming project…
AMD profiting off these slim and future consoles is great, despite redundancy!
I don’t see World of Warcraft coming to consoles unless Blizzard redoes coding to support more than 3 threads maximum, barely using a third, because current consoles use multi-threading via low overhead APIs to accommodate their 8 cores clocked at 1.6/1.75GHz:
http://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=61949096&f=188&p=506826270
However, this might be incentive for Microsoft to push/aid Blizzard to code World of Warcraft for the Xbox Scorpio by adding more threading and DirectX 12, since DX12 has low overhead supporting more threads than previous DX APIs and Asynchronous Computing on which AMD’s GCN architecture excels while current and upcoming consoles have GCN architecture:
http://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=61949096&f=188&p=507044223
Windows 10 users could, then, benefit from WoW using more multi-threaded code and DX12 which might cause millions of players to switch to Windows 10 being the only OS with DX12.
Bethesda announced that Doom will get Deathmatch and Private Match modes via its Free Update 3 later this month! We can expect Arcade mode via the campaign eventually…
I’m highly anticipating AMD’s Zen CPUS!