"the NX is meant to be 3x more powerful than the PS4. That sort of power only makes sense if it's a streaming platform."

You're confusing me. One minute you seem to be discussing streaming from the console, the next streaming to the console. They may coincidentally use the same English word but technically they have nothing to do with each other.

Streaming from the console may require a bit of extra oomph, but if you're designing it into the console from scratch you can add some custom hardware for it and it shouldn't increase general-purpose computing requirements. Streaming to the console by no stretch of the imagination requires anything to be 3x more powerful than the PS4; if you added 4K output to its graphics card, a XBox 360 would be plenty powerful enough to stream even 4K to the console. Sending video streams to the hardware decoder does not take a lot of power. Either way you don't need a lot more power for "streaming" either in or out.

As for specs, it will be coming out 3 years after the PS4 came out. The PS4/XBone generation is generally considered a bit underpowered compared to what PCs could already do at the time. CPUs haven't been advancing much but GPUs have still be clockin' along in the past 3 years. Being merely 3x more powerful than a PS4 is still Nintendo being conservative and not focusing on producing a graphics powerhouse, as has been their style for the Wii line, not some sort of impossible dream.

> "You're confusing me."

I imagine the NX device to be a low cost set top box style affair. The 3x power I'm referring to is the total processing power of the NX platform, with the vast majority of that processing power living in the cloud. Does that help clear up the confusion?

Yes, thanks.

I'd consider it a suicidal move on their part, but that's far from proof that won't be how it works.

> With all due respect, countries without decent Internet infrastructure are unlikely to be places where there are plenty of people with the spare cash to blow on a console.

I think you underestimate the woeful state of broadband in many developed nations.

Here in the UK, many non-rural areas struggle to get more than 8Mbps down, 1Mbps up. With more devices in the home putting demands on connections and many ISPs capping usage (or offering unlimited but heavily throttled connections), downloading or streaming games isn't always viable.

In my own case, I recently moved house and went from an 80Mbps FTTC connection (the fastest available in my city) to 6Mbps. It doesn't take much more than someone at home streaming Netflix while another browses the internet or downloads a 25GB game on the Xbox to make streaming games completely unworkable.

I know the situation is very similar in Australia, New Zealand, areas in Spain..

We often see this skewed perception from American companies that everyone in a first-world country has consistent and fast connectivity. A lot of US products and concepts just die here for that reason. The original Xbox One concept of being download-only would have been a complete failure here.

It's not just poor people (who "are unlikely to be places where there are plenty of people with the spare cash to blow on a console") who struggle for good connectivity.

    > Nintendo has said that the NX is not designed
    > to be a replacement for the Wii U, meaning that
    > Nintendo may still plan to sell the Wii U

Generally these sort of comments can also just mean "please don't stop buying our current stuff just because a replacement is around the corner".

We'll see when it's released, I wouldn't be surprised if it's a complete replacement for their existing consoles.