[citation][nom]jazn1337[/nom]Nintendo 3DS with skype and 3D video calling would be quite the killer app indeed.[/citation]
Except that the 3DS has a major thing lacking, that was, I'll admit, a disappointment to me: it has only one user-facing camera. That means that you can't do 3D videoconferencing, at least from a spot where you could see the 3D screen. Yes, this is a sad day indeed.
[citation][nom]hellwig[/nom]Nintendo has never really been one to follow suit.[/citation]
Actually, their track record for "innovation" has been questionable. They're actually EXTREMELY conservative in their design choices, demonstrating a very culturally-rooted suspicion of branching out too far with too much risk; this is seen with the N64's failure to adopt CD-ROM over cartridges, and the chronic RAM shortage every Nintendo system has. Though a lot of us are crossing our fingers that the 3DS means an end to that.
[citation][nom]VampyrByte[/nom]Nintendo's innovation is a relativly new thing. The Nintendo 64 was a pretty comprehensive failure because of Nintendo's failure to innovate and move on to new technologies.[/citation]
Rather, Technology. Singular. Rather strange, since until the 3DS, the N64 marked Nintendo's most bold outward step; The RCP chip marked not just one of the earliest full-fledged GPUs, but aso became the first GPU to offload T&L to hardware, over 3 years before nVidia would become the second company to do that with some newfangled device they wound up calling the "GeForce."
But yes, the main problem that in the long run doomed the 64 to fall behind the PS1 (after Nintendo actually led with initial sales in '96 and '97) was due to the anemic growth of the game library, hindered heavily by the medium choice; the CAPACITY of a CD was pointless at the time; very few PS1 games passed the 10-20MB mark for actual game content, simply opting to fill the bulk with audio tracks. (which was also helpful since redbook audio tracks were the one music source the PS1 could use that didn't eat up any precious CPU cycles) But overall, at the time, CD-ROMs were actually at a technological disadvantage to ROM hardware; the latter offered much higher transfer rates and virtually zero latency, allowing for vastly quicker loading, (remember Resident Evil's door animation?) and even allowing cases of loading on-the-fly to effectively treat ROM as RAM, allowing for vastly more resources to be used simultaneously.
The main reason the CD-ROM helped was because it was cheap; a company could press them for pennies apiece, and production could be ramped up and down to quickly match demand. By contrast, ROM catridges were expensive, at as much as $60-70 apiece for the larger 32MB ones (Ocarina of Time, Perfect Dark) at the time, and not much cheaper for the 16MB carts more frequently used. (GoldenEye 007, Banjo-Kazooie, Super Smash Bros.) As a result, N64 games had to be planned carefully, and HAD to be big-budget, as there were no "cheap" games. Further, they had to predict sales WELL; guess too high, and you wind up with a situation like E.T. in 1983. But if you guessed too low, you'd be scrambling to slowly ramp up production to meet the demand before it evaporated, leaving you out with millions of missed sales.
CD-ROM had none of those problems; a game could be designed to be sold in the bargain bin from the start, and not much worry was to be had if you guessed your success right; if you went too low, you could easily and quickly stamp out millions more discs; if you went too high, it was a very small loss anyway, (which you could easily recover by drastically cutting price) as only maybe 0.2-4% of your game's sale price went to physical production, versus 60-85% for a cartridge game. The result was that developers much preferred their odds on the Playstation, making 1,404 games for it, versus 282 for the Nintendo64. In the long run, game library drove sales, and this is what killed the Nintendo 64.
/www.forbes.com/2010/06/21/3ds-videogames-wii-technology-nintendo.html
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