OK, the Wii has been a phenomenal success story. It has outsold the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 by huge margins. It has brought gaming into houses that never knew gaming. But...
There are troubling signs. The Wii is not this generation's Playstation 2 and it probably won't have a long shelf life. We're four years into the Wii's life cycle and Nintendo's focus appears to be on handheld gaming, not console gaming. The Wii's software sales are declining and the attach rate is poor. Every time you hear Nintendo talk about "evergreen" titles, what they're really saying is, "We can't get decent third party games for our console, so we're making first party games that we can sell and sell and sell without coming up with anything new because we're doing this all ourselves." Their E3 press conference for 2010 only highlighted this problem as they spent most of the time hyping 3DS and the rest of the time was devoted to a handful of SNES and N64 remakes headed for the Wii in the coming months.
Yikes...
In drumming up a new market--new gamers--Nintendo both assured their success by opening up gaming to a vast, new audience. At the same time, they victimized themselves because this audience just does not buy games! In the process they abandoned the "core" gamers--the ones who actually buy new games on a regular basis--by pushing out a console that is technically a Gamecube with a fancy controller. In 2006, that was an OK thing. In 2010...well, it's not looking so hot.
The Wii looks bad on big screen TVs. In 2006 when all I had was a 27" CRT TV, the Wii looked just fine. I wouldn't have noticed a significant difference between the Wii at 480i and an Xbox 360/PS3 at 480i. In 2010, with a 1080p LCD television, there's a stark difference between the graphics from my Wii and the graphics from my PS3. If I'm a person who only plays Wii Sports and Wii Fit, I wouldn't care about the graphics, but, then, if I were such a person I wouldn't be contributing much to Nintendo's bottom line, since once I had my system and a couple games I wouldn't be spending any more money on it.
The controller is another issue. For games specifically designed for the motion control--Wii Sports, Wii Play, some shooters like Metroid Prime 3 or Red Steel--the control works great and is a really nice change of pace from the traditional controller. For games that only use motion control sparingly or in some sort of hacked-on job (I'm looking at you Twilight Princess), the controller stinks. For most traditional games, the combination of the Wii remote and nunchuck is extremely poor. This includes some of Nintendo's flagship titles such as Super Mario Galaxy*. And it definitely affects third-party franchises, like the LEGO adventure games. Again, if I only play two or three games, I don't care about the controller, but then, I'm not the person buying lots of titles for my console of choice.
Maybe that's why third-party publishers are beginning to abandon the Wii. New gamers don't buy many games and the core gamers would rather play on the 360 or PS3. Madden NFL11 is selling 10x as many units on the 360/PS3 as on the Wii. That's not attracting EA to put more money into making great Wii games. While the Wii is the clear "winner" so far among this generation of consoles, it's hard to really look at it as a win. Essentially, the Wii is a gimmick. If you're new to video games, then the Wii is your entry point, and many new gamers never progress past that entry point. If you're an established gamer, or a new gamer becoming an established gamer, then you quickly outgrow the Wii.
The upcoming advent of Playstation Move and Microsoft's Kinect are only going to push the Wii that much further into gimmick-land.
*Oh, and by the way, Nintendo, I did not spend hundreds of dollars on a brand new system so I could turn the remote sideways and pretend I'm playing an NES. (I'm looking at you New Super Mario Bros. and upcoming Kirby's Epic Yarn.)
