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[gofreak]

The performance-per-watt on all mobile devices is dire. Battery technology is simply not good enough currently for the things we're trying to power

95% of practical shader usage in games falls into a straightforward set of frequently used effects that are well-understood, have a practical effect of improving game visuals, and are suitable to either heavily "realistic" or strongly stylized visuals. In practice this might limit developers somewhat in that other 5% of scenarios, but it's hard to see how catering to developer fancies (which by definition are coming from the people who don't have to worry about hardware costs or battery life) is remotely as important as providing the fundamental, workhorse tools they need to do their job -- the latter of which the 3DS' design unquestionably does.

I think you're pulling out numbers here fairly arbitrarily. If you were to survey the engines in use today on programmable hardware (both the licensed and private ones), and look at their approaches to the pipeline, you might see more variety in approach than you expect, even if there is often recurring patterns in intended end result effects. Depending on how 'fixed' a GPU is, it will be more or less limiting in the choices and tradeoffs and 'bespokeness' you can bring to your engine in achieving those net results and/or others that the GPU's designers may have never thought of. And that this may have some side effects. That's really all I was reminding of.

Your position here is basically like arguing that the PS3 and 360 were design failures because their GPUs are left behind with Shader Model 3 techniques while the PC world is racing forward into exciting new areas. You're riding the Epic line: demanding flexibility that 95% of developers will never even dream of using, even where it's essentially inappropriate to include it. Cutting-edge iterative technologies will advance beyond what fixed-function stable platforms do; that is the purpose of cutting-edge iterative technologies. That doesn't mean that well-designed, fixed-function closed systems are obsolete or not well suited in many ways to the purpose they're put to.

Hmmm. First of all, I never said 3DS's GPU was a design failure, nor obsolete. In fact, for the record, I think it's probably a very good design in the context of the parameters and priorities that we speculate Nintendo has. I was simply pointing out the tradeoffs. brain_stew asked what the big deal was and made some statements about programmable hardware, and I was responding that with the advantages of the approach of the 3DS GPU granted, there was some tradeoff. We were also talking more generally about hardware choices in the mobile market, and my reference to new upcoming hardware that might offer performance that makes more sense of 'generality' wasn't a knock at 3DS, but just placing more of a question mark over the benefit of its kind of approach for future devices as performance scales up and offers the kind of punch that makes general programmability more attractive. It does not mean that for 3DS, today, for the parameters we all think Nintendo has, that I think its approach to the GPU is 'bad'.

 

[MrBelmontvedere]

I really wish there was a Windows hack that pretty much creates a separate Windows OS that filters all of the bloat so I can get the most out of my machine

it's often said that the PCs greatest strength and also it's greatest weakness is guaranteed backwards compatibility. if you got rid of the backwards compatibility you'd have a much faster system, but also you'd get rid of the reason why Windows is the dominant OS on most PCs. UNIX based systems for example go a very long way to removing most of the bloat associated With Windows, yet it's usage in the home is extremely low.

 

[M3d10n]

Is this distinction important, though? Someone doesn't buy an iPod Touch for Angry Birds, but if they buy an iPod Touch and Angry Birds, I'm not sure why that's different than someone buying an iPod Touch for Angry Birds. Unless the implication is intended to be that people are going to stop buying iPod Touches and unlike a DS slowdown, software won't be able to bring people back into the fold. Which, like, I don't think people are going to stop buying iPod Touches

I think the arguments about the kind of software that each platform supports being not fully overlapping (thus guaranteeing each platform's survival) make a lot more sense than this.

I was trying to give a more concrete explanation of the "software doesn't fully overlap" argument. Lemme try again:

Just like the existence of several other cheaper touch-based smartphones doesn't negate the demand for iPhones, iPhone games don't negate the demand for specific titles like Brain Training or Nintendogs. Brand recognition still plays a large part in software space.

 

[charlequin]

But is fair to point out that -- unlike the PC world -- the leading phone manufacturer's products are just as simple and easy to use for gaming as handhelds are.

But in terms of serving as a device primarily for gaming you have brand new tradeoffs like suboptimal controls, poor battery life, competing platforms, dramatically higher hardware price, etc. And you're still looking at some of the built-in problems of PC gaming like refresh juggling (lots of games that'll only run well on the latest hardware iteration.)

The comparison certainly isn't perfect on the smartphone end, but I think it's still quite accurate in a broad sense that the advantages a dedicated system brings to the table are advantageous in a similar way for a handheld compared to a phone as they are for a console compared to a PC.

 

[Futureman]

All piracy talk is plain overblown and is just used as a scapegoat.

Album sales dwindling? Piracy.
Blockbuster movie bombs? Piracy.
FPS game bombs? Piracy.
Hardcore PSP software bombs? Piracy.
Shovelware DS software collapsing? Piracy.
SSFIV port 99% done but no PC port coming out? Piracy.

The list goes on and on and on.

The stuff people pirate are things they probably wouldn't have bought anyway. Despite the money loss, I'd say piracy is for the better since it forces companies to innovate instead of releasing the same old shit, which in return helps the company since a good product will produce fans and brand loyalty, not just consumers.

(in no way am I encouraging piracy, just stating the effect it has).

so what effect does it have? you didn't state that actually. All you really said is that it's overblown (which I sorta agree with).

All he said is that piracy is an important reason for software sales nosediving, and I'd agree.

 

[BishopLamont]

so what effect does it have? you didn't state that actually.

"Despite the money loss, I'd say piracy is for the better since it forces companies to innovate instead of releasing the same old shit, which in return helps the company since a good product will produce fans and brand loyalty, not just consumers".

A positive effect despite the negatives associated with it.

so what effect does it have? you didn't state that actually. All you really said is that it's overblown (which I sorta agree with).

All he said is that piracy is an important reason for software sales nosediving, and I'd agree.

I disagree. "shovelware DS software collapsing" is the response. It's not actually true, it's just one of the overblown piracy talk. The reason DS software is collapsing is the saturation of shovelware DS games (notably Ubisoft's line) and the Nintendo quality settling in, consumers aren't going to keep buying the shovelware after they taste it once.

 

[Futureman]

so if a company innovates, the piraters stop pirating and buy the new innovative game from Gamestop?

 

[Portugeezer]

"Despite the money loss, I'd say piracy is for the better since it forces companies to innovate instead of releasing the same old shit, which in return helps the company since a good product will produce fans and brand loyalty, not just consumers".

A positive effect despite the negatives associated with it.

People will pirate it anyway.

 

[Gravijah]

Piracy is a factor, but there's no way to quantify how big of a factor. It's a big grey area.

 

[Portugeezer]

Why? Not like there's a difference between all these 3DS threads. There's no new news.

The good info thread was locked. This thread has new (unconfirmed) hardware info. And because 3DS is gonna be the shit.

 

[BishopLamont]

so if a company innovates, the piraters stop pirating and buy the new innovative game from Gamestop?

Essentially, yes. You seem to think every pirate is bad to the bone and will pirate everything in site. If they enjoy something enough, they will become a fan of it and will most likely support the company that produces it.

Piracy is a factor, but there's no way to quantify how big of a factor. It's a big grey area.

Pretty much. Which is why its always used as a scapegoat, there's no way to prove otherwise.

People will pirate it anyway.

Yes. Pirates will be pirates but that shouldn't stop company's from trying to capture more fans by increasing their quality, no one everyone is born 18 yrs old and computer savvy.

 

[AceBandage]

Piracy is a factor, but there's no way to quantify how big of a factor. It's a big grey area.

Pretty much this.
It's impossible to put a dollar figure on sales lost to piracy, but I do think that companies should work to curb it regardless, even if it's minimal.

 

[rosjos44]

It's not important on the iPhone adoption side, it's important on the 3DS adoption side.

That is: someone owning an iPhone will very possibly buy games for it, which is great for Apple because that's precisely their strategy -- sell a profitable device that's useful on its own, then get more value-added revenue via "oh hey it does this too!" discovery purchases.*

What type of games will these Iphone consumers purchase though? We know for a fact that many uesrs on the DS / PSP side of things will spend 30 to 40 dollars on a ame but we do not know that for sure on the Iphone. This is a big hurdle because many developers will not go all out on the Iphone if no one seems to think downloading a game for 29.99 or 39.99 is worth it since its jut a digital copy. Many people I talk too think this way and I have a funny feeling that you will not see many big time games on the Iphone compared to a platform thath as been proven to sell major titles on.

This is basically a lot of why I think handhelds and mobiles are going to co-exist pretty effectively for some time -- for most people they aren't coming out of the same "budget line" or serving the same primary purpose, so the only people who are going to completely preclude ever buying a 3DS because they already own a smartphone are the small-pocket brigade.

Jack of all trade systems sound good in the short term. However, many gamers out their would still perfer a platform that is dedicated to gaming.

*There'll be other people who buy an iPhone specifically for games, but probably not many people in the expanded-market cohort specifically.**

**Also, is your power back? Gratz if so!

I agree I think their are people who purchase games on the Iphone for that short term experience but in terms of market analysis would you perfer a market that is split or a market that is dedicated to gaming? As a developer I would choose the later.

 

[ElFly]

Doom 3 has already been comfortably obliterated on the platform, so you can chalk that one of the list. Maybe they'd have to use hardware filtered shadowmaps instead of stencil shadows but that'd hardly be a definite change for the worse. The addition of self shadowing, HDR rendering and scenes with something other than an embarrassingly low poly count should make any 3DS iteration look much more visually pleasing if done properly.

Why'd they have to use shadowmaps instead of stencil ones? The big video memory makes me think that putting a stencil buffer would not be a big cost, even more because it'd be only one byte deep.

 

[Futureman]

Essentially, yes. You seem to think every pirate is bad to the bone and will pirate everything in site. If they enjoy something enough, they will become a fan of it and will most likely support the company that produces it.

I think the majority of videogame pirates ARE bad to the bone piraters. It takes a lot of time and involvement to figure out how to pirate videogames.

It's different with music as it's pretty damn simple to figure out how to do it, and if you do like an album, it's a fairly cheap purchase at that point to just buy the thing.

 

[Somnid]

I'd be willing to bet games like Angry Birds will have a 3DS version (it's already getting a PSP version afterall). Any successful or interesting iDevice game will undoubtedly get ported to as many devices as the developer can port it to, unless they are hardcore Apple fans or something. Exclusivity is what tends to sell hardware in these spaces, and I'm just not seeing that with Apple's apps. Sure we can say they will likely be cheaper on the App Store, but then again 3DS offers compelling reasons like buttons and 3D to pick up crossplatform games there instead of on an iDevice.

I think that Nintendo will actually start stealing some of Apple's newfound gaming success, how much is dependent on how they set up 3DSWare, but the reverse is much more unlikely.

 

[Portugeezer]

Pretty much this.
It's impossible to put a dollar figure on sales lost to piracy, but I do think that companies should work to curb it regardless, even if it's minimal.

I agree, but when it starts impacting the experience of legit customers, then something is wrong (mostly talking about gaming here e.g. Ubisoft's DRM on PC).

 

[M3d10n]

But in terms of serving as a device primarily for gaming you have brand new tradeoffs like suboptimal controls, poor battery life, competing platforms, dramatically higher hardware price, etc. And you're still looking at some of the built-in problems of PC gaming like refresh juggling (lots of games that'll only run well on the latest hardware iteration.)

It's even worse than the PC market: with a PC one can blow a ton of cash now and build a rig that will run everything for 4 or 5 years while the latest smartphone is guaranteed to be utterly obsolete in less than two years.

 

[BishopLamont]

I think the majority of videogame pirates ARE bad to the bone piraters. It takes a lot of time and involvement to figure out how to pirate videogames.

It's different with music as it's pretty damn simple to figure out how to do it, and if you do like an album, it's a fairly cheap purchase at that point to just buy the thing.

Why do the bad to the bone pirates matter? There's nothing you can do to stop them, they're not going to buy your product regardless.

 

[blu]

People forget this.

There may be some small differences when comparing media devices vs game handhelds as oppose to PC's vs consoles, but those small differences can make all the difference.

People seem to forget how terribly unfriendly and unintuitive the user interface computers have.

People also forget how the 'high-profile' idevice games from this year don't work on the idevices from last year. Apple have zero incentives to keep a platform fixed for 5 years so that everybody can develop a solid game or two for the platform. Last, but not least, the idevices from this year are already largely fragmented - the differences in GPU fillrate and available memory are quite serious across all A4 idevices.

I think that the PC-vs-consoles analogy is quite relevant here.

 

[Fantastical]

Essentially, yes. You seem to think every pirate is bad to the bone and will pirate everything in site. If they enjoy something enough, they will become a fan of it and will most likely support the company that produces it.

Yeah, okay... :lol

 

[AceBandage]

I agree, but when it starts impacting the experience of legit customers, then something is wrong (mostly talking about gaming here e.g. Ubisoft's DRM on PC).

Well, that's Ubisoft being Ubisoft.
I don't think there's much that can be done about piracy on the PC, without publishers and hardware manufactures both cracking down hard on it (which won't happen).

 

[BishopLamont]

Yeah, okay... :lol

Really? Its THAT impossible to you to imagine?

 

[rosjos44]

I'd be willing to bet games like Angry Birds will have a 3DS version (it's already getting a PSP version afterall). Any successful or interesting iDevice game will undoubtedly get ported to as many devices as the developer can port it to, unless they are hardcore Apple fans or something. Exclusivity is what tends to sell hardware in these spaces, and I'm just not seeing that with Apple's apps. Sure we can say they will likely be cheaper on the App Store, but then again 3DS offers compelling reasons like buttons and 3D to pick up crossplatform games there instead of on an iDevice.

I think that Nintendo will actually start stealing some of Apple's newfound gaming success, how much is dependent on how they set up 3DSWare, but the reverse is much more unlikely.

Deffinelty, their is mroe appeal to a dedicated gaming machine like the 3DS than apples products especially in the exclusive software area. Google saw this and purchase game developers to develop games on their android market.

 

[charlequin]

I still have the feeling that GAF's oppinion on the effect of piracy is the extrem opposite of the oppinion of the industry

The industry's opinion of piracy is, with a few shining exceptions, uninformed and self-destructive, so I think there's a lot of value in disagreeing with it. I find there are very few GAF posters who will actually argue that piracy is "meaningless" or has no sales effects, but quite a few who think it's best treated as manageable but inevitable losses, much like more sensible retailers treat shrink -- the only logical approach is to find the cheapest moderately-successful strategy available for mitigating it and then accept that losses above that point are inevitable.

Re: Europe's dip specifically, as Chris1964 intimates, we have enough information available to see that things don't really add up for the specific correlation proposed, so I think it's safe to discard any assertions that the DS is "losing money" or "in trouble" or what-have-you that provide piracy as their asserted cause.

I think you're pulling out numbers here fairly arbitrarily.

Well, it's because I don't care much about the level of minute distinctions you're making here, really. Can the 3DS do basically every effect that's in wide use amongst developers these days? Yes. Can it do them relatively easily, in a way that can be incorporated into development pipelines targeting other hardware? Yes. That already limits the range of potential issues with this hardware direction to an extremely small portion of scenarios, enough so that I really don't care (nor, I assert, should Nintendo) whether it limits one or two particularly clever developers from writing a slightly more efficient blur algorithm or what have you.

I mean, yes, there are tradeoffs, definitely; I think brain_stew's assertion is that those tradeoffs are largely meaningless for this particular system, and I'd agree.

 

[Futureman]

Why do the bad to the bone pirates matter? There's nothing you can do to stop them, they're not going to buy your product regardless.

Meh. My buddy owns a car wash. OWNS IT. He has lots of money is what I'm saying.

He pirates everything though. He loves videogames. Pretty sure he'd be buying them if there was no way to pirate.

In fact, when there is no way to pirate, he does buy. He bought Halo Reach because you can't play it online with a pirated copy.

But I DO agree with the sentiment that the industry overblows the issue.... but... I dunno. It's not really surprising that they do that. It's their business.

 

[Portugeezer]

Why do the bad to the bone pirates matter? There's nothing you can do to stop them, they're not going to buy your product regardless.

He is talking about video game pirates, where besides the DS or PC you have to do quite a bit of reading up and possibly open up your system to even have the ability to pirate.

Most casual pirates who download music for free wouldn't even bother.

 

[Fantastical]

Really? Its THAT impossible to you to imagine?

Yes, it really is. The only reason I see 95% of hardcore pirates buying a game is if there is a reason to buy it outside of the actual game. Like a collectible or something.

 

[Gravijah]

Meh. My buddy owns a car wash. OWNS IT. He has lots of money is what I'm saying.

He pirates everything though. He loves videogames. Pretty sure he'd be buying them if there was no way to pirate.

In fact, when there is no way to pirate, he does buy. He bought Halo Reach because you can't play it online with a pirated copy.

This is the thing. Every pirate pirates for different reasons.

 

[Vic]

There's an important difference between the PC/Console and Phone/Handheld comparison though.

The primary strengths of consoles over the PC were that they were 1) Less expensive and 2) More streamlined and intuitive. While handheld certainly are cheaper, it just so happens that the leader in the phone world is Apple, not Microsoft, and they've accomplished this feat with a closed, highly intuitive system.

I'm not sure how much of a difference that makes. But is fair to point out that -- unlike the PC world -- the leading phone manufacturer's products are just as simple and easy to use for gaming as handhelds are.

The employment of similar technology between smartphones and gaming devices at the moment is blurring the vision of a lot of people. The business motivations are just not the same between both sectors. Certain decisions that Nintendo takes with their hardware & software design can't or/and will never be adopted by smartphones manufacturers. Decisions that might be definitive factors of the success of their upcoming handheld gaming platforms eg: CrossPass mode.

 

[AceBandage]

So, with all this piracy talk, we know that Nintendo has been talking up the 3DS anti-piracy measures as the "end all be all".
What exactly do you think they'll do?
Maybe the Cross Talk mode constantly checks for hacks in the system or something.

 

[Gravijah]

So, with all this piracy talk, we know that Nintendo has been talking up the 3DS anti-piracy measures as the "end all be all".
What exactly do you think they'll do?
Maybe the Cross Talk mode constantly checks for hacks in the system or something.

It has cameras for a reason.

 

[AceBandage]

It has cameras for a reason.

It doesn't sleep.... It waits.

 

[BishopLamont]

Meh. My buddy owns a car wash. OWNS IT. He has lots of money is what I'm saying.

He pirates everything though. He loves videogames. Pretty sure he'd be buying them if there was no way to pirate.

In fact, when there is no way to pirate, he does buy. He bought Halo Reach because you can't play it online with a pirated copy.

That just means his a enough of a fan of Halo to buy it instead of pirating it (whether he can or not is irrelevant), proving my point of how piracy can have a good effect. Like I said, you can't do anything about the hardcore pirates, so why not just cherish and take advantage of the good that can come out of it? Even if its a rarity.

Yes, it really is. The only reason I see 95% of hardcore pirates buying a game is if there is a reason to buy it outside of the actual game. Like a collectible or something.

He is talking about video game pirates, where besides the DS or PC you have to do quite a bit of reading up and possibly open up your system to even have the ability to pirate.

Most casual pirates who download music for free wouldn't even bother.

Yes, pirates are cheap and lazy. I. Know.

 

[Graphics Horse]

Why'd they have to use shadowmaps instead of stencil ones? The big video memory makes me think that putting a stencil buffer would not be a big cost, even more because it'd be only one byte deep.

Because there is some kind of hardware support for shadowmaps, which may or may not be faster than creating shadow volume geometry.
Memory wise the 8 bit stencil buffer is already part of the hardware too, probably left over bits of the rgb or depth buffers.

Not convinced the 3DS will be doing any more than Doom 3's 'embarrasingly low poly count' though, or proper HDR. The Capcom example looked not much more than the image blended with itself with an overlay calculation.

 

[Somnid]

So, with all this piracy talk, we know that Nintendo has been talking up the 3DS anti-piracy measures as the "end all be all".
What exactly do you think they'll do?
Maybe the Cross Talk mode constantly checks for hacks in the system or something.

Honestly, unless Nintendo has been pumping tons of money into digital security I have the feeling it won't be terribly effective. I can see more of the schemes we see in consoles like banning from online services, firmware checks, and what-not. I also think they will continue using the built-in flash as a protected area and force all applications to launch from there and not the SD card.

 

[BishopLamont]

So, with all this piracy talk, we know that Nintendo has been talking up the 3DS anti-piracy measures as the "end all be all".
What exactly do you think they'll do?
Maybe the Cross Talk mode constantly checks for hacks in the system or something.

It'll be easier to crack than the PS3, bet on it.

 

[Portugeezer]

Everything gets hacked eventually, even PS3 got hacked. Once you hack, you never go back.

 

[MrBelmontvedere]

pardon my ignorance, but how long did the first DS last until it was hacked? what about the GBA?

 

[Vic]

Everything gets hacked eventually, even PS3 got hacked. Once you hack, you never go back.

But will it be easily hackable like the DS with something like a simple R4 card? I wonder.

 

[DeathbyVolcano]

pardon my ignorance, but how long did the first DS last until it was hacked? what about the GBA?

I think the DS took around...maybe half a year?

 

[antonz]

I noticed on the ARM site they make specific mention of the CPUs having a DRM system built into the chips. Its possible Nintendo may be working on a multi tiered approach to combating piracy with the ARM DRM and whatever other systems they have in mind.

 

[ILikeFeet]

how difficult is CPU DRM cracking compared to the normal method that Nintendo uses?

 

[Chris1964]

Iwata answering investor questions after revealing the company's yearly earnings,

I do not find a lot of meaning in calculating up the amount of damage due to piracy. While we may be able to calculate the damage by 'number of downloads' multiplied by 'their market value' it does not necessarily mean that all the downloader had the purchase intention but quit due to illegal downloading. This calculation only gives us a virtual amount of damages, not the actual one in market. As I believe it's not very meaningful to calculate them, we have not dug deeper and have no such plans to do so.

 

[Opiate]

But in terms of serving as a device primarily for gaming you have brand new tradeoffs like suboptimal controls

That's a new trade off? (Sort of kidding: not true historically, but certainly true of most genres that are now big on HD systems).

poor battery life, competing platforms

Agreed on these counts.

dramatically higher hardware price

The disparity between consoles/PCs is no longer huge, but for most of the last 30 years -- during which consoles thrived -- there was.

The comparison certainly isn't perfect on the smartphone end, but I think it's still quite accurate in a broad sense that the advantages a dedicated system brings to the table are advantageous in a similar way for a handheld compared to a phone as they are for a console compared to a PC.

You can also make the comparison between DVD players and PCs, and so forth. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. I'm just pointing out how these situations are different, so that if the 3DS does indeed underperform, we can begin to see how and why that happened.

 

[Kilrogg]

Nice debate going on. Carry on .

That's a great point and also the reason why Nintendo needs some kind of software that "defines" the 3DS.

Yeah. So far, the one flaw I see with the 3DS — if we view it through Iwata's philosophy of expanding the gaming population and whatnot — is that it's an excellent device with nothing new as of yet. The games it's got are as traditional as it gets, or at best evolutions of what the DS brought to the market (e.g. Nintendogs > Nintendogs + Cats). Nintendo is a secretive company, so I'm sure they've got some new concepts in the pipeline, but right now, the 3DS really is a DS+ with Japanese PSP titles as a bonus.

 

[DeathbyVolcano]

fuck fuck fuck three days until we see fucking GAMES

 

[EmCeeGramr]

yes. just three days until we can start the nintendogs 3ds hype thread, for true gamers

 

[DeathbyVolcano]

god yes

 

[AceBandage]

Screw Nintendogs.
I'm hyping the superior FamiCats.