Nintendo Uses Colored Beads to Explain Wii U Storage

[Scrythe]

"You should probably invest in external memory, because we can't be arsed to include it ourselves."

Cheap for them, but not for you!

Actually it is cheap for you.

A hard drive will cost you about $50 if you just get a mediocre one, giving you about 500gb of storage. If they made it so you could buy a 32gb model or 64gb model, then you would be paying $100 for about 1/10th of the storage.

And all of this would cost me absolutely nothing on the side if it was internal!

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

"You should probably invest in external memory, because we can't be arsed to include it ourselves."

Cheap for them, but not for you!

Actually it is cheap for you.

A hard drive will cost you about $50 if you just get a mediocre one, giving you about 500gb of storage. If they made it so you could buy a 32gb model or 64gb model, then you would be paying $100 for about 1/10th of the storage.

And all of this would cost me absolutely nothing on the side if it was internal!

Well, no, but it would raise the base price of the system...

 

[Towowo]

I recall years ago I tried running an MMORPG through an external drive hooked up through a USB into a computer that would normally run it, but it's hard drive could barely contain more than the operating system (last hard drive crashed, had to use a shitty one I had lying around). Obviously this is a pretty extreme example, but try running a modern-day game through that same setup and you're going to get some of the most disgusting bottlenecking you could experience.

You know running games off of USB 2.0 is still faster than disc drives and without the wear and tear on the drive.

Who the hell said anything about stream?

Yes, you can use an external Hard Drive for storage, but no-one ever said you could play games off that. Basically, every time you want to play a digital game, you're going to have to uninstall something from the main hard drive, and install a new game on it. Then you can play it - won't that be fun?

I don't recall them ever saying you needed to do what you said it'd do either.
If I recall when Nintendo added the SD Card Menu to the System Menu on the Wii that is indeed how it worked but there is no evidence saying the same will be done with the Wii U.

 

[sethisjimmy]

32 gigs is really small for these days. I have a 60 gb Xbox and I still have to do a ton of deleting old games and rearranging data to make room.

It'd be more simple to have an option for a terabyte or half terabyte. The cost would be slightly higher, but it's better than having your maximum option barely the size of 3 big games.

 

[Towowo]

[/quote] http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?p=62330051 [/quote]

Ah okay thanks for clarifying that, but it was indicated it was also a rumor and that the statements were misinterpreted. I don't think Nintendo would be dumb enough to do this.
It'd be completely counter-intuitive.

 

[Scrythe]

"You should probably invest in external memory, because we can't be arsed to include it ourselves."

Cheap for them, but not for you!

Actually it is cheap for you.

A hard drive will cost you about $50 if you just get a mediocre one, giving you about 500gb of storage. If they made it so you could buy a 32gb model or 64gb model, then you would be paying $100 for about 1/10th of the storage.

And all of this would cost me absolutely nothing on the side if it was internal!

Well, no, but it would raise the base price of the system...

True, but not by much, and I certainly wouldn't have to go out of my way to purchase side equipment just for the ability to do more than look at my shiny new console's menu screen.

 

[Mr.Mattress]

and let me guess, you can only use nintendo licensed external hard drives...

... No, you can use any external hard drive available, as long as it can hook up to the system fine. No Nintendo License required.

did you know back then when console gamers used to tell you that you wouldn't had to fight with a dozen of wires like on a stupid pc to get it running?

and did you know how well it turned out for sega to have different expensive devices you had to connect in order to play "the latest and visually stunning games"?

ah, god old times.

This is completely different. The WiiU is not an expansion for the Wii, it is a new system entirely. External Hard Drives don't require wires to run into the system; they can be simple USBs.

i wonder how long it will take pirates to exploit the external hard drive option.

As soon as everyone else; about 2 seconds, because you can plug in any external hard drive...

OTL Super excited for the WiiU! I can't wait to get mine for Christmas!

 

[Towowo]

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?p=62330051

Ah okay thanks for clarifying that, but it was indicated it was also a rumor and that the statements were misinterpreted. I don't think Nintendo would be dumb enough to do this.
It'd be completely counter-intuitive.

It'd also be counter intuitive to try to set the WiiU up as some home media hub, and yet forget to give it the ability to at least play DVD's.

I can honestly get the gripes about not being able to play DVD's but is that neccasary of a feature? Most people have about a large amount of devices that can already play movies.
In regards to the previous point above, I don't believe that 3.2 GB would ever be enough to do what the Wii did with the SD Card Menu. I don't think for a second that Nintendo would advertise external storage options and having the Wii U not being able to play games from it.

 

[RanceJustice]

I don't understand why Nintendo didn't simply make a single hardware version, selling the 32gb "Premium" package exclusively? Its only $50 more than the other, adds a ton of stuff from 4x the storage of the Basic, to an included game. I figure the money they'd save from not having to design 2 SKUs (and for that matter, not having to build at least 2 separate Wii U hardware systems, with 8 and 32gb etc...) they oculd easily have pushed the single "premium" package down to $299 if they figured they would sell better with an option under $300. If for some reason that wouldn't work, they could have simply removed NintendoLand from the Premium package and sold it for $299 or even less! If they wanted to have a special "Elite" version that cost more, they could have gone the other way by adding stuff to the premium package, such as 2x LCD controllers, 2x Pro controllers, a coupon for another game, a limited edition 1TB external HDD etc...

The Basic model doesn't even seem to be worth the time, energy, and from the sold-out pre-orders, space on the production run to create! I can see no benefit to it, financially or otherwise, at the given price-points and packages. Such a waste!

 

[thesilentman]

4.2 GIGS FOR PROFILE/SYSTEM DATA?! What the hell?

I can install Operating Systems (with useful programs) that use half as much space. I really hope there was a misunderstanding somewhere. Wow.

I'm doing this right now. And 8 gigs is too little for any system nowadays, be it a repurposed machine or NASA's gaming rig (duh).

I recall years ago I tried running an MMORPG through an external drive hooked up through a USB into a computer that would normally run it, but it's hard drive could barely contain more than the operating system (last hard drive crashed, had to use a shitty one I had lying around). Obviously this is a pretty extreme example, but try running a modern-day game through that same setup and you're going to get some of the most disgusting bottlenecking you could experience.

How bad was it? Just curious. I myself have run an OS[footnote]Ubuntu, if you know about it. It's what I'm doing right now as I'm typing this.[/footnote] off of an USB stick before, and the performance hits came after I booted up memory extensive programs (Firefox and GIMP) and push the limits of performance off of a USB.

OT- Come on, Nintendo. You know you want our money. It's sitting right here waiting for you to FINALLY get the system right. We'll leave if you don't want our money.

Come on, I find 250 gigs on my PS3 to be not as much as I thought. And if games are going to finally advance, they need to have more space to implement better graphics, AI and so forth.

 

[Something Amyss]

I absolutely am 100% for the ability to use external hard drives for my consoles. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before? Though this does basically tell me that when I get a WiiU I might as well get the elite package anyway just so I don't have to buy a hard drive right away.

Nintendo was supposed to do it last gen, interestingly enough. then they decided not to.

Someone else already covered the issue of speed (which may make the WiiU the only console for which this is feasible), so I'll leave that alone. But it was thought of before, at least.

 

[Vivi22]

I absolutely am 100% for the ability to use external hard drives for my consoles. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?

I can guarantee that people probably have. And they may have been held back by external drives typically being quite slow until fairly recently unless you had a SATA or good firewire connector. I'm a bit surprised actually since the WiiU has USB 2.0 ports which aren't the fastest thing in the universe these days (and never have been really). I guess it depends on how ambitious the digital titles get and how quickly they need to stream data from the drive.

Who the hell said anything about stream?

Yes, you can use an external Hard Drive for storage, but no-one ever said you could play games off that. Basically, every time you want to play a digital game, you're going to have to uninstall something from the main hard drive, and install a new game on it. Then you can play it - won't that be fun?

Which would essentially mean that games which are bigger than the 3 or so GB available (such as the one listed in the article) would still be completely unplayable. Are you sure this is what you'd have to do to play anything that's on an external hard drive? Because if that's the case then Nintendo is recommending a solution which is only slightly less useless than the built in storage.