At least they don't cut salaries....

Or jobs

Well that's still 80% bonus and that's still better than cutting divisions...

Just 80% bonus?! No thanks! I think I'm gonna look for another job....

Shhh. You are ruining the d0med train.

Wii Sports didn't invent motion control or anything like it. The Power Glove came out 17 years earlier. It was also imprecise and awful, but that's neither here nor there. SM64 was different to everything that came before it. Wii Sports was a fun diversion that appealed to a wide range of people, and nothing more.

It doesn't depend on tastes Basil, we all know that almost all systems before the last 2 gens released with uninteresting software. It takes little VG knowledge to say as much. They mostly had one or two mega games, and the rest were filler.

With the WiiU, all the launch games are top and offer great value to the system for a Wii owner, regardless of whether or not the games appear on other platforms. Of course, to an HD twin owner the multiplats don't count as value-adds, but then you'll complain whether they're there or not, so ppl will never stop complaining.

So, these people can eat Nintendo's shorts.

@Wii Sports. This was an immensely popular game, whether it invented motion controls or not, it doesn't matter. The delivery was much much better than the power glove on the technical and marketing front. You can't dismiss a piece of software that led to the sales of 30M+ units (I'm saying 30M+ because resort sold standalone for the longest time to in the late 20M units). It also provided an added value that made the purchase of the Wii appealing to a horder of buyers, leading to 90M+ units sold lifetime. It's not just another power glove.

He didn't say the most system sellers... smh He said the best.

And he isn't wrong, look at  them, the games are top quality.

Just as Wii Sports didn't "invent" motion control, yet was the first to truly make it successful, so too was Mario 64 not the first 3D platformer. Early 3D platformers include Congo Bongo (1983, released by Sega for Atari, Commodore, and others), 3-D WorldRunner (1987, made by Square for Famicom/NES), Alpha Waves (1990, released by Infogrames for Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS - widely considered the first true 3D platform game), Jumping Flash (1995, released by Sony for the Playstation), and Crash Bandicoot (beat the N64 to market in America).

What both games did was take something that had until then been unsuccessful, and turn it into a massively successful thing. Of course, innovation (which is different from invention, by the way) requires success, otherwise it's just a gimmick. Mario 64 changed how games were made, and most modern 3D games can attribute at least some of their design to Mario 64. Wii Sports is massively affecting game development, to such an extent that both Sony and MS are making efforts to have their own motion controls be supported as much as possible.

Whether the Wii U will prove to be innovative is yet to be seen. NintendoLand may end up being the game to prove it. Or it may end up being just another game. At this point, it's all speculation.

Anyway, Nintendo cutting employee bonuses by 20% is fairly reasonable, and to be honest, I think it shows just how much Nintendo means business - I mean, it's the first time they've ever had an annual loss, and the CEO took a massive pay cut, and then they cut employee bonuses by a smaller amount. How many companies go to such extents? It's why Nintendo is going to be around for a long, long time.

I think people overstate the importance of Wii Sports. It was basically a tech demo which was successful because it was bundled with the Wii and it showed off the Wii's controls, not for any other reason. It isn't objectively a very good or deep game. In that way, Nintendoland seems more likely Wii Sports than Mario 64. It's more "Look what our technology can do!" than "Look what we've managed to do with our technology!"

It also isn't entirely fair to say that Wii Sports pushed Sony to go into motion control. They had the EyeToy in 2001, and at the same time they were demoing this:

But as you say, we haven't seen a lot about Nintendoland. It could end up being the next Mario 64.

Wii Sports was a lot more successful than you give it credit for. Not only did it basically establish the motion control paradigm, but most stories about the Wii being popular centred around Wii Sports - Wii Sports being played in nursing homes, Wii Sports being a hit at bars, Wii Sports being the game that gamers play with their families. It wasn't as "successful" with traditional gamers, at least the ones that spend a lot of time on the internet... but there's little doubt that Wii Sports is a major part of the Wii's success. So much so that Wii Sports Resort has sold nearly 30 million copies, and most of that is not bundled.

Remember, innovation isn't about going "look what our technology does" or "look what we managed to do with our technology" - it's about establishing something that becomes a norm, taking something that has never before been successfully implemented, and implementing it successfully.

And I'm sorry, but until the Wii was a massive success, Sony treated the Eyetoy as just a minor peripheral, and showed no interest in motion controls of any greater significance. Note that the only eyetoy title that sold more than 450,000 copies was the original  EyeToy Play (which managed a significant 4.2 million... but nothing was ever able to follow it up). While a few games had EyeToy functionality included, most of those were games where the EyeToy was basically used to take a picture and use it in-game somewhere. EyeToy was an innovation... but was never intended as an innovation of game control.

Sony likes to go "we've had it in development for a long time"... but the fact of the matter is, they only added motion controls to the PS3 (sixaxis) in response to Nintendo's unveiling, and more generally, were very critical of the Wii remote's design... right up until they announced Move. Penny Arcade made the point very well.

Sony may theoretically have been working on motion controls at the time that the Wii was announced... but there's no indication that it was ever heading anywhere. Sony added motion controls to the Sixaxis... yet most people forget it even has motion support, seemingly including Sony themselves.