@lstormy10, I believe hardware does matter: true, if close enough the cheapest-weakest console won in the past, but Wii is not close enough to the competition: it's in it's first year and developers can't put on it the big game of the years and big gamer titles. However it doesn't really make sense to tlak about who wins in a market that's diversifying like this. As long as sales are made everybody wins. However I do believe that to maintain high sales in 2009-2010 Nintendo would have to release a new wii which could get a lot of the ports from the other platforms. That is unless it turns out Nintendo can survive completely without pleasing the hardcore gamers (by that i mean all the people wanting GTA, final fantasy, Assasin's creed... who care about features in graphics and world detail), in which case they're quite off the charts. Hard for me to imagine that way for long... or maybe it's possible but it just shifts from my areas of interest into realms like fitness equipment and toy like devices. Those segments I bet have huge markets... it's just that I personally tend to have a blind spot there. As much as I'd hope for gaming to be there I don't think games are yet like movies for the hardware to not matter: I can't really see as probable for Wii to have too many best shooter of the year, best rpg, best action game... in the years to come... which I think will leave it behind as a platform of choice for many gamers as time goes on. Obviously huge sales can continue theoretically without them, as there's a much bigger chunk of non-gamer population than gamer one, but personally I think that right now a big chunk of Wii hype has started from gamers... and if these move away... That's why I agree with Pachter that Nintendo will in a couple of years release a Wii 2 to catch up to it's competitors and allow multiplatforms.
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I believe hardware does matter: true, if close enough the cheapest-weakest console won in the past, but Wii is not close enough to the competition: it's in it's first year and developers can't put on it the big game of the years and big gamer titles. However it doesn't really make sense to tlak about who wins in a market that's diversifying like this. As long as sales are made everybody wins. However I do believe that to maintain high sales in 2009-2010 Nintendo would have to release a new wii which could get a lot of the ports from the other platforms. That is unless it turns out Nintendo can survive completely without pleasing the hardcore gamers (by that i mean all the people wanting GTA, final fantasy, Assasin's creed... who care about features in graphics and world detail), in which case they're quite off the charts. Hard for me to imagine that way for long... or maybe it's possible but it just shifts from my areas of interest into realms like fitness equipment and toy like devices. Those segments I bet have huge markets... it's just that I personally tend to have a blind spot there. As much as I'd hope for gaming to be there I don't think games are yet like movies for the hardware to not matter: I can't really see as probable for Wii to have too many best shooter of the year, best rpg, best action game... in the years to come... which I think will leave it behind as a platform of choice for many gamers as time goes on. Obviously huge sales can continue theoretically without them, as there's a much bigger chunk of non-gamer population than gamer one, but personally I think that right now a big chunk of Wii hype has started from gamers... and if these move away...
That's why I agree with Pachter that Nintendo will in a couple of years release a Wii 2 to catch up to it's competitors and allow multiplatforms.