We’ve been hearing about the Wii U specs for ages now, some developers saying that the specs are great, other developers arguing that the Wii U isn’t powerful enough, and then we got good old Nintendo saying the smart thing: specs don’t matter, it’s about the gameplay. That statement is being echoed by developer Blitz Games Studios, whose John Nash says that while Microsoft and Sony are building powerful next gen consoles, Nintendo doesn’t have to. They have the innovation, the IP, and the talent to create great games that don’t need powerful hardware to impress people. Nash says that it’s very easy for developers and gamers to get “hung up on hardware specs”, and while it’s great to have powerful hardware, gaming is about much more than that. He said:
“It’s not about beating everyone else in a surface shader processing clock speed war. That’s not what Nintendo is about. They’re about saying, ‘we’ve got this great roster of IP, all these great characters, how do we build a piece of cost-effective hardware that will allow our players to interact with this IP and great worlds and characters in a new way?'”
Nash added that he imagines the Wii U offering online connectivity and new features to existing Nintendo franchises, for example, exploring the worlds of Zelda and Mario with friends. He also points out the obvious: Sony and Microsoft will be battling on specs once again, while Nintendo will be doing something different. Not everyone believes this will be a success though, as analyst Michael Pachter recently criticized this very approach Nintendo is using with the Wii U.
Recently, another set of Wii U system specs were reported, with the same tri-core CPU, AMD GPU we’ve heard mentioned before. However this time, it was reported that the console would pack 1 GB of RAM instead of 1.5 GB as previously thought. The competing PlayStation 4 and Xbox 720 are rumored to include hardware with many-core CPUs and several GBs of memory.
