dont get me wrong I think the wii could be the ‘winner’ of this gen, you’ve only got to look at how much it is dominating japan right now to understand it has pretty good odds. I’m just miffed I’ve not turned the thing on for a month.

what does your hunch think the chances are for this new band I heard about, the Beatles? :)

it’s true that Wii doesn’t have much games (like many of you, Joonas, Nate and others mentioned) compared to other consoles, and if you look at their release list, you can tell it’s pretty short!

July 30 Mario Strikers Charged Nintendo
Aug. 20 Metroid Prime 3 Corruption Nintendo
September Battalion Wars 2 Nintendo
Aug. 14 High School Musical: Sing It! Disney Interactive Studios
Aug. 14 Madden NFL ’08 EA
August Tiger Woods PGA Tour ’08 EA
August Space Station Tycoon Namco Bandai
August Brunswick Pro Bowling Crave
August Dave Mirra BMX Challenge Crave
August Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection Crave
September Brothers in Arms Ubisoft
September Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal Warner Bros.
September George of the Jungle Crave
Fall Boogie EA

I strongly believe that if Nintendo would consider opening the development, the sustained growth could be achieved.

Russ pointed out that hardcore gamer market is tough to compete, but I have the image (and after listening to maybe about 4 people, so my market research might need some re-work :) that people love the new way of controlling the game. It’s not just new fancy graphics… it’s something different. How long that difference will keep boosting the sales, but as you look at the PS3 sales for example (82,000 april, 199,000 in march)… they are telling rough message! I don’t know what those hardcore gamers are waiting, but from these numbers it looks like PS3 games won’t help much.

We’ll see.

The Xbox 360, my personal pick in the long run, and the PS3 will be better at meeting the hardcore gamer market with exceptional titles, XBLA/PSN capabilities and online gaming. The Nintendo Wii is said to try to be winning hardcore fans but attracting casual gamers as well. The casual games market is thriving, but mostly on hardware that casual gamers already own: like a computer or a cell phone. It will be a hard sell to get people to continue to purchase a $250 piece of equipment to play casual style games and that’s it. (For a far better success story, one can look to the DS.)

This leads me to another problem I see with the Wii: game line-up. Working at a third party publisher who fully intends to support the Wii, we still see it as a second tier platform. Triple A titles are going to the 360/PS3 while the Wii will get ports with tacked on Wii Remote functionality. Lackluster but strong support from third parties is going to be detrimental in the long run. Nintendo is the only company who seems to fully see the potential in their own hardware. And with a release schedule of only three or four high profile titles a year, the road ahead looks far less bright.

You can probably tell there is a ‘but’ coming up. I love it, but, I think it was a fleeting joy. No new games have captured the revolution feeling since wiisports and wario and that to me is quite sad. How long will it be before the next revolutionary game comes along?

btw: your hunch needs to wake up, the wii has been the top seller for a long time now. (bar the ds)

And I think the PS3 is the cheapest Blu-Ray player(or it was), so if they lowered the price, more people would buy it for something other than the games(I think Sony tried to make it like a PC with word processors and keyboards and everything) and they’d lose more money.

Microsoft is also losing money on the 360 sales and Nintendo is breaking even so game sales matter more(although the number of consoles sold would influence game sales).