Industry Chatter 06.16.2011

Now is not a good time to own Nintendo stock. Following their announcement of Wii U, shares of Nintendo fell 5.7% to 16,930 yen, which is a five year low. Analysts had high expectations for Nintendo’s E3 conference, and obviously many people feel that Nintendo fell far short of the desired mark. Whether it was the lack of any actual Wii U games from Nintendo, the Wii U name, or a mix of the two and more, people are not happy. Michael Pachter has come out and supported the Wii U controller, saying “for once, Nintendo is ahead of the curve,” while at the same time saying that “the console is two years too late.”

While some developers have been very supportive of Wii U, others haven’t been quite so positive. Beyond Good and Evil creator Michael Ancel said “Wii U is current gen in terms of technology, and next gen in terms of interface.” This comes after many game developers, including Ubisoft, struggled to state how powerful the system actually is. Reports are coming in now that the system is 50 percent more powerful than the PlayStation 3. This would put Wii U in the realm of current consoles, not next gen, as Michael Ancel said. Next generation consoles from Microsoft and Sony are bound to be multiple times more powerful than their current systems, as opposed to not even twice as much power Wii U will have over PS3.

As far as graphics go, Wii U is using a last gen Radeon chip that is similar to the R770, which is better than those found in Wii U’s competition. It will have Direct X 10 support, compared to the Direct X 9 of Xbox 360. An interesting item to note is that Wii’s graphics card is capable of four SD video streams, though as of right now it looks highly unlikely that we’ll use more than two tablet controllers with one Wii U. Nintendo of America’s president, Reggie Fils-Aime supposedly told Michael Pachter that the system can handle two Wii U controllers at once, but Nintendo has yet to confirm this.

Were you wondering why Nintendo showed footage of Xbox 360 and PS3 games at their conference? According to consulting company “Hit Detection,” developers were working with underclocked kits to get footage in time for E3. When Nintendo saw that the game videos looked just better than what you’d find on a competing console, they cut it, and replaced it with the other footage. Hit Detection says that Darksiders II could have been shown if Nintendo wanted it to. Nintendo hasn’t commented on this story and probably won’t.

Nintendo has also begun grabbing domain names that have anything to do with Wii U. They range from “wiiuwheel.com” to “newsupermariobrosmii.com,” but also include “wiimusicu.com” and “wiipartyu.com.” With Nintendo realizing that it went about revealing Wii U the wrong way, maybe there will be some more changes in the future. Time will tell.