The #1 way to become hated is to become successful in a way that people think is undeserved ...

The PS3 and XBox 360 were systems which were designed to appeal to a small segment of the gaming public (the 'Core' gamers) which are heavily represented in the gaming media and in online forums; they were successful with capturing the minds, hearts and wallets of a large portion of this demographic. The Wii was designed with little or no focus on these gamers and therefore the Wii's unexpected success is seen as undeserved by these gamers. The result of this is these disgruntled gamers will write in their little blogs forcasting the doom of the Wii, or talking about some perceived shortcomming of the Wii until the next generation begins.

HappySqurriel,do you expect some of the 'core' gamers to slowly warm up to the Wii?....I don´t follow handhelds stories,but I´ve heard the DS is now considered a big 'hardcore' system as well..

Not every 'Core' gamer is bitter about the Wii's success, and some of those that are currently bitter may end up buying a Wii down the road and find out they actually enjoy it ... but this doesn't mean that articles like this will ever stop. 10 years from now you will see people write summaries of what happened in this generation which basically bash the Wii regardless of what the generation ended up like.

I never understood the "Wii collecting dust thing", I know that many people who own, being casual in Nature may only play it once a week or so, but there is more than enough must play games right now for the Wii to keep it up and running. Also, I notice about 90% of Wii bashing contains some sort of Anecdote in the vein of "None of My friends ever play their Wii"

Wait, did you just say the Wii is doomed this year, effectively make yours the...least intelligent...post I've seen all year.

It's because people who hate the Wii are bandwagon jumping the New York Times article, trying to get as much mileage as they can.

@JGarret:

There are a lot of different core gamers and a lot of them are actually Nintendo fans, because they grew up with NES and SNES.
Don't let anyone fool you in to thinking that Halo is "hardcore" and Mario is not. Real core gamers play them both.

Harcore =/= mature.

I think core players will more and more go for Wii. WiiWare looks very promising, the games are there and more coming, VC offers a lot of amazing retro games and it's affordable, so people can easily buy it next to their gaming-PC/PS3/360.

Good points,BengaBenga.....I also grew up with the NES and SNES...good times.

Don't jump on him too hard. He's just making the saem assumption a lot of people make: because Nintendo hasn't yet revealed their line up for the 2nd half of 2008, people simply assume there won't be anything released. 

 While there's quite a bit of truth in what you're saying, I think the biggest reason so many of the traditional players attack the Wii so viciously is that they know it heralds a future in which they are no longer the sole, or maybe even biggest, demographic for developers to cater to. Remember, the Wii is deliberately going after people who don't traditionally play games, or who stopped playing games a while ago, and its doing this through a combination of a new advertising style and by releasing "non-games." The Wii scares the beejezus out of these folks because it is making money hands over fist by offering something that does not concentrate specifically on the traditional gamer, and these people know that if the Wii continues to be successful, more and more developers will begin to focus their energy on games that do not appeal primarily to this niche.

This is not to say that traditional games are going to disappear, far from it. It's just that mommy and daddy have a new baby, so they're paying (a little) less attention to Gamer now, and the traditional response of a spoiled brat who doesn't get his way is to throw a tantrum. Long story short, don't expect the situtation to change for a while yet, although in a few years I'm sure most folks will come around when they realize that just because you have a sibling, doesn't mean you're not still wanted (so long as you've got the cash, that is ).