So why do people believe that the PS4 is just $50usd more expensive than Wii U?

[Negatempest]

I'm definitely considering price when I look at the Wii U.

As was pointed out earlier, the Wii U is using old technology. The Wii U is barely more powerful than the PS3/360 which are five year old systems, so why does it cost $150 more? If the Wii U launched in 2010 with its current specs and $350 price point, I may have considered it to be a good value then.

The current game bundled with the system does not add any value because the games are old and are no longer worth full $60 MSRP. Obviously that will change if the Wii U does get bundled with a new game.

The biggest issue with the Wii U is the tablet controller. I'm aware that off-tv play has use to many people, but it does not have any use to many others. Doing some research the tablet controller costs about $80 to make. If it wasn't required and included then the Wii U would sell for $40 less if it only included the Pro controller.

. Your mid paragraph is interesting if you look at it. Now if a completely new game was added, wouldn't that game be old as well within a year? Again as I said and you agree. Value in a game is very important. I like Nintendo Land. You don't like Nintendo Land. Does that mean your value of it is more high than mine? Nope, just means that we value it differently. No real conclusion there.

Also the last paragraph, same thing. I have a few younger brothers that share the same TV with me. I would like to play the Wii U while they play the ps3 or xbox360. The fact that later on I can play Wonderful 101 or Bayonetta 2 just on the controller alone skyrockets the value for me. Thus the game or brand sell the console to me, in this case a feature for the game. I'm not saying that your wrong in your value, it isn't. I am saying though that the gaming media does not emphasize anywhere near enough on who the Wii U can be for. (Families like mine. ) They too just compare price or graphics.

 

[Negatempest]

That OP is meant to be confusing. When it gets down and dirty, without creating a second paragraph going into super details on why the price has no real influence, (If you would like me too, I will. ) the games or the brand is what is going to sell you the console, not the price. All that OP mumbo jumbo is completely unnecessary bullshit that is one of the last things to consider when you decide on the console you want.

OK, fair enough for the OP I guess.

Except... You intentionally made it confusing and then you make fun of me for missing the point. Where does that make sense?

I have asked you several times why you made the thread the way you did, why you focused more on price than anything else. Why you would rather throw out accusations and avoid the issue when asked than actually explain it.

After all the accusations you have come up with about me missing the point, about me using Amazon incorrectly, me over analysing things and all that you go with the path that you always intended to confuse... it seems like I won't ever get a real answer out of you. You are avoiding answering again I see. You recognize that you have lost this argument, but rather than admitting it you avoid it. I can't say I am surprised.

Ah sorry, I did not mean to make fun of you. I will apologize for that.

Edit: I focused on price because that issue is brought up a tremendous amount of times. Considering how not near half a grand both consoles are, the price is very negligible at best. Price is a strong focus though completely ignores what each console brings to the table. One focuses on power, the other focuses on play style. Each choice is has it's good or bad side. And in the end when you compare what you want from, games, play style, brand, secondary options, etc. Than after all that is considered, than you look at the price. For me the option for the Wii U was obvious for many reasons and the $350 was right for every thing it got right for me. That does not mean the ps4 is a terrible option. Just not one I can benefit from and the price had nothing to do with it. Thus I put console value over price.

 

[WouldYouKindly]

Holy Christ, I don't think I've ever seen someone post so much even in a thread they started.

On paper, it isn't. In terms of actual value, it is. Honestly, the Wii U uses old technology in every aspect. A tri-core processor, a heavily modified AMD 4600 series graphics card, and a scant 2 GB ram. It's significantly more powerful than the PS3 and the Xbox 360, but they aren't telling us those are next generation consoles. You could build a similar PC for about 200 bucks if you don't buy an OS. As a matter of fact, that 200 dollar PC could blow the Wii U out of the water in most aspects.

In other words, I don't see how the cost of the components could possibly justify the cost of the Wii U. The graphics card is damn near worthless, 3 generations behind the bend and was barely entry level for gaming back then. The processor is nearly as bad. An old tri-core running at 1.24 GHz. My old laptop ran at 2.0 GHz(admittedly a dual core machine). Just about the only thing good about it is the clockspeed of the RAM, 1600 MHz. Even then, it's 2 GB of DDR3 RAM.

Meanwhile, we know the PS4 will use an 8 core processor. With that many cores, clock speed is nearly irrelevant. It will be at least three times as powerful as the Wii U. I can't pick up much on the GPU, but it should be similar in performance to a Radeon 7800 series card, a fairly high end card in today's market. Finally, it uses 8 GB of GDDR5 RAM. There is no comparison. The PS4 is a hell of a lot stronger of a machine, easily worth the 100 dollar price difference.

Simply put, if I were looking to buy a PC to play games on and there was only a 100 dollar difference between these two, I'd pick up the second one in a heart beat.

Let it not be said that the Wii U is a bad machine. After all, you can run Skyrim on an Xbox 360. Devs can do a hell of a lot with what the Wii U has, but in terms of raw numbers, I don't see it as being good enough to justify it's price.

Ah, graphics. One of the last things you should think about honestly. You really can't bring in superior graphics to support a console because any well built gaming PC will blow any console out of the water with a similar price. No competition there. Now if you mention games that are specific for said consoles than that is when you get into the meat and potatoes of the discussion. Which leads to my end clause. The games or brand is what will sell you the console, not the price.

My point is that Nintendo can't justify how expensive their console is based on hardware.

I did make a caveat at the end. Developers can and will still make good games for the Wii U, and they can even look good considering the machine they are on. The GPU is just one aspect of it though. If you've got less resources to work with, programming a game is more difficult because you need to work within tighter parameters. The Wii U has the tightest parameters of all the next gen consoles. It won't run as fast, the loading times will be longer if everything else is the same and it will be even more difficult to port for, further alienating 3rd party developers. That's the other point I make with regards to the Wii U. It's got odd controllers and is using outdated parts making it more difficult to design a game for while also having that game be available on other consoles. Porting from Xbone to PS4 to PC will be fairly straightforward since any game that will run on a gaming PC would also run on a PC with the specs of the Xbone and the PS4. Hoops will have to be jumped through to get the same game to run on the Wii U.

In the end, it's got no games for it for those reasons, it's not at all friendly to 3rd party developers.

 

[Negatempest]

Holy Christ, I don't think I've ever seen someone post so much even in a thread they started.

On paper, it isn't. In terms of actual value, it is. Honestly, the Wii U uses old technology in every aspect. A tri-core processor, a heavily modified AMD 4600 series graphics card, and a scant 2 GB ram. It's significantly more powerful than the PS3 and the Xbox 360, but they aren't telling us those are next generation consoles. You could build a similar PC for about 200 bucks if you don't buy an OS. As a matter of fact, that 200 dollar PC could blow the Wii U out of the water in most aspects.

In other words, I don't see how the cost of the components could possibly justify the cost of the Wii U. The graphics card is damn near worthless, 3 generations behind the bend and was barely entry level for gaming back then. The processor is nearly as bad. An old tri-core running at 1.24 GHz. My old laptop ran at 2.0 GHz(admittedly a dual core machine). Just about the only thing good about it is the clockspeed of the RAM, 1600 MHz. Even then, it's 2 GB of DDR3 RAM.

Meanwhile, we know the PS4 will use an 8 core processor. With that many cores, clock speed is nearly irrelevant. It will be at least three times as powerful as the Wii U. I can't pick up much on the GPU, but it should be similar in performance to a Radeon 7800 series card, a fairly high end card in today's market. Finally, it uses 8 GB of GDDR5 RAM. There is no comparison. The PS4 is a hell of a lot stronger of a machine, easily worth the 100 dollar price difference.

Simply put, if I were looking to buy a PC to play games on and there was only a 100 dollar difference between these two, I'd pick up the second one in a heart beat.

Let it not be said that the Wii U is a bad machine. After all, you can run Skyrim on an Xbox 360. Devs can do a hell of a lot with what the Wii U has, but in terms of raw numbers, I don't see it as being good enough to justify it's price.

Ah, graphics. One of the last things you should think about honestly. You really can't bring in superior graphics to support a console because any well built gaming PC will blow any console out of the water with a similar price. No competition there. Now if you mention games that are specific for said consoles than that is when you get into the meat and potatoes of the discussion. Which leads to my end clause. The games or brand is what will sell you the console, not the price.

My point is that Nintendo can't justify how expensive their console is based on hardware.

I did make a caveat at the end. Developers can and will still make good games for the Wii U, and they can even look good considering the machine they are on. The GPU is just one aspect of it though. If you've got less resources to work with, programming a game is more difficult because you need to work within tighter parameters. The Wii U has the tightest parameters of all the next gen consoles. It won't run as fast, the loading times will be longer if everything else is the same and it will be even more difficult to port for, further alienating 3rd party developers. That's the other point I make with regards to the Wii U. It's got odd controllers and is using outdated parts making it more difficult to design a game for while also having that game be available on other consoles. Porting from Xbone to PS4 to PC will be fairly straightforward since any game that will run on a gaming PC would also run on a PC with the specs of the Xbone and the PS4. Hoops will have to be jumped through to get the same game to run on the Wii U.

In the end, it's got no games for it for those reasons, it's not at all friendly to 3rd party developers.

Not making a game because of less resources is just a lazy way for developers to find an excuse for not trying. Some of the best selling games on steam are not pushing graphics at all. Killing Floor, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, Mine Craft, and most other indie games hardly push graphics at all. But they are on high demand. They see what they have and work with it, not against it. They focus more on the gameplay quality of the game than the visual eye candy. More resources does not mean a better game. We hope it means a better game.

If your focus is solely on 3rd party, why should a person not skip over consoles all together and just get a gaming PC? All the graphics debate will do is lead to the all mighty gaming PC rig. Sure porting may be difficult, I will not debate that since I am not a game developer. But the unfriendly to 3rd party developers is a rumor at best. The most obvious reason, that everyone knows by know, that the Wii U has no 3rd party games is because there are barely any consoles sold. If there were lots of consoles sold the 3rd party developers would make games for it since they can make money off of it. But no console sales, no games. A bad cycle until Nintendo throws out more 1st party games to sell consoles.

Your argument, though may seem sound, stands firmly on the rumors 3rd party developers put out. That has been constantly contradicting one another since the Wii U launched. And what I am saying, since the beginning, is that if the console you like has the games you like you will buy it and price will have very little to no factor in it.

 

[Lightknight]

Not making a game because of less resources is just a lazy way for developers to find an excuse for not trying. Some of the best selling games on steam are not pushing graphics at all. Killing Floor, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, Mine Craft, and most other indie games hardly push graphics at all. But they are on high demand. They see what they have and work with it, not against it. They focus more on the gameplay quality of the game than the visual eye candy. More resources does not mean a better game. We hope it means a better game.

More processing power doesn't just mean better graphics. It deals with physics rendering and AI. In a game that is intended to have realistic physics and AI that respond intuitively, those things are SIGNIFICANTLY harder to scale down than graphics. See, I have a super powerful pc. When I get ports from consoles or even pc games that are intended to be ported to consoles, I can make them look prettier by flipping a switch in the system. But I can't always make a lot of the inner workings better because they weren't coded to be that complex. I think graphically we have landed on at least the upward slope of the uncanny valley this generation. It won't be a large step to get to the other side in this upcoming generation. So I really don't think the advance in hardware is going to be that dedicated to graphics. Yeah, it'll advance it and make it look better, but I think our real advances will be in physics and AI this gen which should actually do a little bit more to tackle the uncanney valley than just throwing more graphics (emotions, hah) at it will.

As for your examples, I have a few points to make:
1. Left 4 Dead 1 came out in 2008 and 2 came out in 2009. It did push graphics at the time and was especially demanding of enemy AI pathing. Team Fortress 2 came out in 2007. The cartoony style did help with the graphical demand but ultra realism wasn't the intention. Killing Floor was a mod for Unreal Tournament 4 that was released in 2005 and then re-released in 2009. It was criticized for the relative quality of its graphics in 2009 but that's not too bad for a polished up 4-year old mod that is now an 8-year old mod at the time. Minecraft was an unexpected breakaway success but is the strongest point to be made. But I fail to see how most of these make any point at all. They are all separate examples and their style may have nothing to do with the vision of the game being made. While you are right that more resources don't necessarily make a better game, you fail to account for the biggest titles and their sales. The AAA big sellers do have better graphics. People DO enjoy realistic environments and will pay top dollar for it. People need to stop pretending that graphically demanding games are some kind of evil. They are liked and appreciated by millions. The only thing that's stupid is when companies outspend any possible amount that they could make back to make the game look better. But that's a company being bad at budgeting, not the graphic's fault.

2. Are you saying that developers should allow the WiiU's specs limit the quality of their work just because it exists? Why? The WiiU will be significantly weaker in a way that just scaling back graphics may not be able to fix. That alone could require significant resources. Combine that with the fact that the WiiU is the only non-x86 machine and you'll see that it also requires the most resources to port. Lastly, the deplorable sales mean that there's little or no reward for porting titles at the end.

3. Think about this. On the Wii [http://www.vgchartz.com/platform/2/wii/], the number one individually selling game (that wasn't bundled with the console or a popular peripheral) was Wii Fit plus (there are 6 better selling titles that were sold in bundles and so the number may be inflated like Wii Sports was). Still It sold an astounding 21.22 million copies. With around 100 million wii consoles, this means that around 21 out of every 100 wii owners owned this game. The average game attach rates for all three consoles was in the range of 7-9 (the Wii actually did better than both even though the attach rate was slightly lower than the 360 because the Wii sold 20 million more units so its attach rate is more heavily weighted). I say that to explain that this one title was many times more popular than the average by any stretch of the imagination and without any kind of asterisk to its name to downplay it (the next best seller was Super Mario Galaxy which was a still hugely impressive 10.87). Devs would kill for those numbers.

With that in mind, if the WiiU makes it to 5 million units, the best selling title's same proportion would have sold around 1,061,000 copies. While that is certainly a large number, remember that this would be the most profitable possible and that's not anywhere to major with 100's of titles selling more than that on all three current gen systems. The twelfth title, my favorite of the system, is Mario party at 8.16 million copies. On the WiiU that's around 408k. Again, that's at 5 million.

What's more, you probably don't find this surprising, but people buy Nintendo consoles to gain access to Nintendo's software. Third party devs don't do nearly as well. Of the top 20 sellers on the Wii, only 2 publishers are non-Nintendo. Just Dance 1,2,3 and 4 have all cracked this number (Ubisoft) and Zumba Fitness at 6.48 (505 games). These, if you haven't noticed, are a very particular kind of game. The types of titles that do very well on the wii are the Singing, dancing, etc types of games. Not the traditional AAA plot-based game titles. So why should developers risk anything on the WiiU?

4. The WiiU [http://www.vgchartz.com/platforms/] is tracking worse than the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast only had 8.4 million units sold over two years. Presently, the WiiU could double its software sales and Hardware sales and not match the Dreamcast on either front. Even the Dreamcast's attach rate was more than double the WiiU's current one. Though I'm of the opinion that the Sega Saturn is what killed Sega. The WiiU couldn't match that one either if it doubled everything but the Sega Saturn had 5 years so I think the Dreamcast is the better example.

So tell me, what hope does a 3rd party developer really have here of making it big on the WiiU? Once that sale ratio starts hitting in the average attach rate range (7 or 8) even for the Wii or lower you're talking in thousands and not millions for even hugely popular titles. Of the 55 titles that sold over a million copies, 32 are Nintendo brand (58%). The WiiU's current attach rate is 2.57. So hitting the average right now would mean 128,500 IF the WiiU is at 5 million units which it isn't. With the actual number in mind (3.61 million units) that number is less than 100,000.

5. Here's a hint [http://bgr.com/2013/07/30/nintendo-wii-u-sales-asda/], there are at least 5 versions of the next gen consoles that have already been selling more preorders than the WiiU itself has been selling this year and they haven't even been released yet. 4 PS4 versions and 1 XBO version. Other consoles have also been selling better including the psp, ps3, and 360. In 2012, two different versions of the Vita and the psp also made it into the top 100 best sellers of the year but the WiiU didn't. Even in its release year.

In summary, developing for the WiiU is a risky bet to make for very little return. It isn't lazy developing not to port to the WiiU, it's a legitimate business strategy at the moment.

EDIT: Corrected the link pointing to the retailers dropping the WiiU. Accidentally had it going to the console database I was using to generate the numbers.

 

[Raikas]

The games or brand is what will sell you the console, not the price.

I think it's actually more fair to say that the right combination of price and games will sell the console. Yes, the people with brand loyalty will buy their favourites regardless, but for a huge segment of the market that's less important than having the option to play some games (not even specific ones) on a reasonably priced piece of hardware.

Personally, I don't buy consoles until the first price drop - I see zero value to being an early adopter. I don't need to play new games while they're new, I don't see the point of being loyal to one brand over others, so why would I pay more for something that offers less? So I wait - the price goes down, and along with the passage of time we'll also have a bigger library of games. But it's those two things together, not one versus the other that makes the decision for me (ultimately I usually end up with most of the console options - but the order in which I get them is never just about games or just about price).