Morning Brew, Nov 19th: Wii U shows its insides, Nintendo likes Indies, and the next Xbox revealed?

Morning Brew, Nov 19th: Wii U shows its insides, Nintendo likes Indies, and the next Xbox revealed?

Nintendo’s Wii U flexes its technical muscles

Image courtesy AnandTech

With the launch of the Wii U in the US this past weekend, many questions we had were finally answered by the company. Wait, no they weren’t. The launch was nearly disastrous, with online issues, patches, supply constraints and all kinds of chaos taking place. Nintendo still hasn’t told us what’s even inside the box. Lucky for us, the folks at Anandtech have gone fishing and gutted the device for our geeky pleasure. Inside they’ve found IBM’s 45nm CPU, an AMD RV7-based GPU and 2GB of RAM. By comparison, the Xbox 360 and PS3 have 512MB of RAM.

None of this means anything unless developers have enough time with the system to understand it properly. Word around the web is that the ports of games that came to the Wii U are having frame-rate issues or graphical glitches, something that is fairly typical during console launches with ports. Will the third parties stick around? That’s anyone’s guess… They sure didn’t do it during the Wii’s lifetime.

Source: AnandTech via Engadget

Nintendo allowing Indies to set their own prices and sales

Trine 2 on Wii U
Trine 2 on Wii U

In a bit of a rare, anti-Nintendo twist, the company has purportedly jumped into the new millennium by allowing independent developers the option to set whatever price they’d like for their games in the eShop. Speaking to IGN, Mikael Haveri of Trine 2 developer Frozenbyte noted that Nintendo has moved closer to Valve and Apple’s model, even allowing developers to release patches and updates for free.

The obvious advantage to this is more competitive pricing allowing more games to appear on the console. Our thoughts revolve around the possibilities that Indies can come up with for dual-screen play on a console. Some of the 3DS and DS indie titles have been absolutely fantastic, and we can only imagine what could happen in HD.

Source: IGN

RUMOR: Next XBOX to be super-powerful, include the kitchen sink

Render courtesy XBox World

As E3 gets closer, and Sony and Microsoft are expected to showcase their next gen offerings, the purported leaks are starting to pop up. The latest rumor comes courtesy of XBox World’s penultimate issue, detailing the Redmond giant’s next console. Supposedly, the beast will come armed with 8GB of RAM, BluRay, Kinect 2.0, directional (3D) sound, and the ability to link to augmented reality glasses. This joins the growing list of fabled specs for the device which, according to XBW’s self-created rendering, could be GINORMOUS. Like, coffee table size.

Regardless, it certainly begs to question one thing: price. Knowing how much Nintendo struggled to get their Wii U to market at $299 with modern tech, anything future tech might cause the next Xbox’s price to creep back into the $500-$600 range.

Source: Xbox World via CVG

DaliQuesting: Game of Thrones season three teaser trailer!

It’s certainly not much, but dammit if I’m not excited! Book 3, which the season is based partly on, was one of the most exciting pieces of literature I’ve ever read. It certainly has a lot to live up to, but HBO can pull it off.