I'm guessing Snakey can't tell you that, Samus. Or maybe he could but, James Bond style, he'd have to shag you afterwards.
A Black Falcon, i think what Snakey is saying is that until the Analog Devices, ST Micro and PixArt press releases came out there were all sorts of weird and wonderful ideas on internet discussion boards about how the controller worked. From radar, to sonar, to GPS style tracking, to magic pixie dust made by the Nintendo elves in Princess Peach's herb garden. Many of the more rabid posters clearly had no clue about the relative costs of the solutions they proposed, and there is a certain breed of Nintendo fanboy that clearly thinks Nintendo have limitless buckets of money to burn in their hash pipes whilst crafting uber-mega products from scratch that Sony or MS could never hope to replicate.
Nintendo themselves never confirmed or denied any of the speculation. Why should they? Never give out more information than you absolutely have to is a pretty good policy in competitive business. If people chose to interpret what Nintendo have said about the controller in a certain way, i don't think that's particularly down to Nintendo. Going back through what Nintendo have said in the past, the message about the Wii was consistently 'we are focusing our efforts on how a player interacts with games to make them more accessible, rather than blowing a huge wad on uber-graphics'. The message has always been small, low power consumption, affordable. That means less investment, less production cost, not more. And reading Mr Iwata's GDC speech, it looks like a very honest appraisal of the investment they made in the controller to me.
What he didn't say explicitly, but is clearly also the case, is they're not actually in a position to blow as much money as MS or Sony have on their fancy console engines. Instead Nintendo did some lateral thinking and worked out a way to make people excited about their next generation console *without* spending billions in the process. I think it's a stroke of genius, and if i was Nintendo shareholder, i'd be very happy at this point.
Even so, one shouldn't underplay how big that controller investment was to Nintendo.
Sure, it's not as big an investment as the $4 billlion MS sank into Xbox R&D and money lost on each sale, or the $300million Sony invested in
the original Playstation, or the estimated $2bn-$2.5bn invested in development of
PS2 and PS3. But then, Nintendo isn't in a position to steamroller itself into dominating yet another market on the back of the obscene $8-12billion (30% of sales) net profit made every year from OS and Office productivity monopolies. Nor is it able to use its processor design and manufacturing facilities across many of the product lines of its parent company. A billion dollar plus
Cell CPU investment only makes sense if you can spread its cost across a significant chunk of $65billion in year sales.
Nintendo is a company with around $4-5billion in sales, $5-800million net profit, and ~3000 employees, and spends around $200million on R&D (hardware and software) each year. According to
IGN they have around 850 developers in Kyoto, and if you look at the breakdown given, the vast majority of these are games developers. I counted 50+ in "Nintendo Research & Engineering" responsible for portable hardware, and a maximum of 150 in "Nintendo Integrated Research & Development" only some of which are responsible for console hardware (let's say another 50 are involved in console hardware, and 100 in software). I believe these divisions have changed since then, but presumably they still have somewhere near the same numbers of people doing the same jobs.
So, if you assume 100ish people working on hardware at all, and it's split 50:50 portable:home console, then 15 people working on a controller, which is just one part of an entire console, is a big proportion of your available hardware engineering resources for that console. If they had just made "a new plastic box to put it in"
and stuck in a bluetooth radio and mems gyro/accelerometr like their competitors did, rather than reconceive it again from scratch, it would have only cost a fraction of that to design. Not only that, every unit sold will also make them less profit (and most likely a loss at first), if they want to price it competitively with Sony's and MS's controllers. Then of course there's the many millions of dollars investment being made in working out ways for Nintendo's games for Wii to make use of the controller's capabilities in ways that will actually prove entertaining and attractive to hardcore gamers, casual gamers, and possibly even my mum.
Add all that lot up and i don't think Mr Iwata overstated it when he said that the controller was a big deal for them.
Anyway, enough rambling. Let's get on with some more We Wub Wii posts
