Nintendo: The Revolution will not be in HDTV.

Teehee... the graph makes my heart smile. Microsoft makes enough money. But in the vast scheme of things, I'm a happy camper as long as there are consoles for my sugardaddy to program for.

Irrelevant. The fact is that Nintendo sells less units at a lower price point than Sony or Microsoft, and yet they see a significantly larger profit. Sounds to me like they've got a pretty good business model going, but then I'm not an official business analyst or anything.

HDTV will have no practical significance for the next generation of consoles. At the moment, HD sets account for around 10% of TV shipments, there's very little HD programming available via cable or satellite, and there's zero prerecorded programming. There just hasn't been a killer app for HD yet, and I doubt video game consoles are going to be it. Widescreen format is not the issue here either as 480p, which is a non-HD format already suppored by the GameCube, is 16:9. Most DVD players will output 16:9 and I watch DVDs full-screen on my HDTV all the time despite there being no such thing as an HD DVD.

That said, while Nintendo may have no plans to support HDTV, at least in terms of requiring support as Microsoft is, I'd be more interested in what their graphics vendor has to say on the issue. Basically any modern GPU will output HD resolution easily, you'll be nowhere near CPU limited at 720p. Rumor is that Revolution will have 16MB of EDRAM for a framebuffer, which conveniently enough is 4x the memory necessary to hold one frame of 720p video... which would allow HD output + frame buffer effects like anti-aliasing.

Nick

I assume you wouldn't have the time what with all the official joke rehashing you seem to be busy with.

In my case, I rehash the same jokes over and over in order to save time. Creativity costs precious minutes of life, and frankly I don't have to impress you people.

i seriosly doubt microsoft H&E is concerned with making profits at this point. they just want to build a fanbase and put consoles in homes which they are doing with game titles and live.
but, back to the topic, its been what, almost 4 years since the release of the current consoles? a lot of tech has changed since then, i think its wise to build features into your consoles that will be more common down the road. but, as curiouskitty said, its more likely for the revolution to be in the kids room than in the livingroom. smart choice to cut costs, but its not going to attract gamers from other systems. but, with those profits from that chart (id like to see one from a non-nintendo based site) i doubt they are interested in uprooting other consoles loyal fans.

Here's the problem, A) That graph is questionable since we have no idea where it's from, what earnings Quarter of what year it's talking about (most recent doesn't really cut it Journalistically), or who even made it (it looks like it was made with Wordpro v.02 beta...

Here are some actual numbers:

Sales
Microsoft: $34.27 billion
Nintendo: $4.26 billion
Sony: $63.23 billion

Profits
Microsoft: $8.88 billion
Nintendo: $0.57 billion
Sony: $0.98 billion

Assets
Microsoft: $85.94 billion
Nintendo: $9.06 billion
Sony: $68.04 billion

Market Value
Microsoft: $287.02 billion
Nintendo: $12.80 billion
Sony: $38.00 billion

Data from the Forbes 2000 (as of February 13, 2004)
http://www.forbes.com/

(url here...)

Of course, that's probably total sales (instead of just Software), I don't know... look it up if you want. Personally, I think maybe Nintendo can float allong and appease the Japanese market for a while if it likes, but I don't think it will ever be as popular in the United States as it was during the 80s...

I don't see Sony or MS having any problems with their respective consoles, and from reading the console news, I don't think that Revolution is going to give them any problems at all.

[Edited on Jun 14, 2005 by sadisticmika]

And how much of the money made by Sony and Microsoft was actually made by their gaming divisions? Every account I have read has basically said that Sony and MS are keeping their consoles afloat with money from their other divisions as part of a greater strategy for "living room dominance". That's all well and good, but it's not going to sink Nintendo if they're continuing to make good money from their operations.

MS Home and Entertainment Q1 '04
Sales: $632
Profit: ($142) loss

Sony Games Q1 '04
Sales: $976
Profit: ($27) loss

Nintendo Q1 '04
Sales: $758
Profit: $214

There's a lot more in that thread. It looks like if MS and Sony were just gaming companies, like Nintendo, they'd be out of business. Well maybe not Sony but definately MS.

Me, I really don't care if the Revolution has HDTV or not, since I'll be getting one either way. Hell, I bought my Xbox only after GTA and KOTOR came out. Based on what I saw from E3, I won't be getting an Xbox 360 (stupid fucking name) or a PS3 for a long time.