Anyone remeber when everyone said WII was a fad

[Kenny]

HappySqurriel said:

If you consider the definition for fad like "A fashion that is taken up with great enthusiasm for a brief period of time; a craze." then you can easily consider all dominant consoles of their generation to have been fads ... The height of most console's popularity is only (about) 5 or 6 years, and after that a new system will come along and be adopted very rapidly and achieve similar heights of popularity.

Saying 'the Wii is a fad' as a negative towards the system only really demonstrates a misunderstanding of the gaming market and what a fad is.

 

Now, as for the calls about third party publishers 'commiting financial suicide' as Kenny put it ... what I think we have seen is many publishers are having difficulty adjusting to a market that did not turn out the way that they expected. Part of the problems they have is the difference in performance makes it difficult to switch the target platform of games mid development like they would have done in the past, and another part is that what makes for an interesting Wii game is different than what makes for an intersting PS3/XBox 360 game.

I don't disagree with that - just about everyone bet on the wrong horse.  However, from what I see, publishers aren't adjusting to the current market reality.  Instead, they seem to have made a decision to stick it out to the end with the PS3 and XBox 360, for better or for worse, ignoring Nintendo except with attempts to bury them with shovelware. 

For example, immediately after the Wii wrested the lead from the 360 in North America, Ubisoft announced Prince of Persia...  for the 360 and PS3.  After that, at E3, EA Games' lineup showed that most of their big budget games are still avoiding the Wii.  As well, Valve has talked a great deal about supporting the Wii all the way back in January 2007 (a year and a half ago) AND made their disdain for the PS3 clear, but the score's still PS3 one, Wii nothing as far as Valve's concerned. 

I could name more examples, but I think everyone gets the point.  The writing on the wall should have been clear enough at the time they started development of the game, so exactly how dominant does the Wii have to be before they get first-string developer support?  From what it seems like, the threshold will always be the current userbase + 1.