Yesterday, Nintendo dropped a pair of bombshells on the gaming world. First, the company announced that it had partnered with Japanese mobile game development company, DeNA (pronounced DNA), and would bring its major franchises — all of them — to mobile gaming. Second, it has begun work on a next-generation console, codenamed the Nintendo “NX.”
Both of these announcements are huge shifts for the Japanese company, even if it took pains to emphasize that Nintendo remains committed to its first party franchises and its own game development efforts.
Nintendo’s partnership with DeNA
Partnering with an established company like DeNA theoretically gets Nintendo the best of both worlds. It’s only barely dipped its toes into free-to-play content, while DeNA has shipped a number of games using that formula. It has no experience in developing franchised titles for smartphones or tablets, whereas DeNA has plenty. But partnering with a third-party gives Nintendo another potential advantage — it’ll let the company effectively field test new gaming concepts and paradigms on hardware that’s at least as powerful as its own shipping systems.
Revisiting the “console quality” graphics question
One of the more annoying trends in mobile gaming the last few years has been the tendency of hardware companies to trumpet “console quality graphics” as a selling point of mobile hardware. Multiple manufacturers have done this, but head-to-head match-ups tend to shed harsh light on mobile promises.
When it comes to Nintendo’s various consoles, however, the various mobile chips would be on much better turf. First off, there’s the Nintendo 3DS. Even the “New” 3DS is a quad-core ARMv11 architecture clocked at 268MHz with 256MB of FCRAM, 6MB of VRAM with 4MB of additional memory within the SoC, and an embedded GPU from 2005, the PICA200. Any modern smartphone SoC can absolutely slaughter that feature set, both in terms of raw GPU horsepower and supported APIs.
What about the Wii U? Here, things get a little trickier. The Wii U is built on an older process node, but its hardware is a little stranger than we used to think. The CPU is a triple-core IBM 750CL with some modifications to the cache subsystem to improve SMP, and an unusual arrangement with 2MB of L2 on one core and 512K on the other two. The GPU, meanwhile, has been identified as being derived from AMD’s HD 4000 family, but it’s not identical to anything AMD ever shipped on the PC side of the business.
The Wii U’s structure, with triple-core CPU
By next year, the 16nm-to-14nm SoCs we see should be more than capable of matching the Wii U’s CPU performance, at least in tablet or set-top form factors. If I had to bet on a GPU that could match the HD 4000-era core in the Wii U, I’d put money on Nvidia’s Tegra X1, with 256 GPU cores, 16 TMUs, and 16 ROPS, plus support for LPDDR4. It should match whatever the Wii U had, and by 2016, we should see more cores capable of matching it.
Nintendo isn’t going to want to trade off perceived quality for short-term profit. The company has always been extremely protective of its franchises — ensuring mobile devices (at least on the high end) are capable of maintaining Nintendo-level quality will be key to the overall effort. At the same time, adapting those franchises to tablets and smartphones gives Nintendo a hands-on look at what kinds of games people want to play, and the ways they use modern hardware to play them.
What impact will this have on Nintendo’s business?
Make no mistake: I think Nintendo wants to remain in the dedicated console business, and the “NX” next-generation console tease from yesterday supports that. Waiting several years to jump into the mobile market meant that mobile SoCs had that much more time to mature and improve, and offer something closer to the experience Nintendo prizes for its titles.
The question of whether Nintendo can balance these two equations, however, is very much open for discussion. Compared with the Wii, the Wii U has been a disaster. As this chart from VGChartz shows, aligned by month, the Wii had sold 38 million more consoles than the Wii U has. The chasm between the Wii and Wii U is larger than the number of Xbox One’s and PS4’s sold combined.
Image by VGChartz
Without more information, it’s difficult to predict what the Nintendo NX might look like. Nintendo could have a console ready to roll in 18-24 months, which would be well within the expected lifetimes of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One — or, of course, it could double-down on handheld gaming and build a successor to the 3DS. Either way, the next-generation system will be significantly more powerful than anything Nintendo is currently shipping.
Pushing into mobile now gives Nintendo a way to leverage hardware more powerful than its own, and some additional freedom to experiment with game design on touch-screen hardware. But it could also signal a sea change in development focus. If the F2P model takes off and begins generating most of the company’s revenue, it’ll undoubtedly change how its handheld and console games are built — and possibly in ways that the existing player base won’t like.
Balancing this is going to be a difficult achievement for the company — a bunch of poorly designed F2P games might still make short-term capital, but could ruin Nintendo’s reputation as a careful guardian of its own franchises. Failing to exploit the mechanics of the F2P market, on the other hand, could rob the company of capital it needs to transition to its new console.
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