Atari 2600 as a lesson to game designers ... and a foreshadowing of the Wii

[Millennium]

This is an interesting article, but to be honest, I think a better parallel is the NES: a console that rebuilt the market after a crash by using broad appeal to build a new base of gamers.

I believe that the Wii was built along similar lines: Nintendo predicted a crash among the fratcore, and sought to rebuild the market as early as they could. Nintendo must, after all, have a market; Sony and Microsoft have other divisions, but gaming is all Nintendo does, so if the gaming market goes down Nintendo goes with it.

And to be honest, I think the crash has come. The HD market is having a lot of trouble sustaining console exclusives, thus the rash of cross-platform games we've seen this generation. Porting costs money, but not as much as new games, and the HD console markets are so small (the PS3, for example, has only just barely outsold the Gamecube) that it's the only way a lot of these expensive games can make any profit at all.

The PS3 and 360 cling to their precious "hardcore" segment, because they didn't see this coming, but it was inevitable. The fratcore are growing up, getting a taste of what maturity really is, and therefore growing disillusioned with the M-rated games they were once so obsessed with. They've been trained so hard to reject "kiddy" games that they see nothing left in gaming for them, and so they leave a market they themselves took pains to ensure people didn't get into quickly enough to replace them via the whole pwn-the-n00bs domination mentality. This was inevitable, and it is too late to stop it. Sony and Microsoft will be forced to adapt if they want to survive.

In two generations, the 'hardcore' will be very different from what they are today. What will they prove to be? I don't know. But I don't think they'll resemble the hardcore we currently know, and given what that demographic did for gaming, that's probably a Good Thing. Maybe the heirs to the title of 'hardcore' will prove more worthy stewards of the market than their predecessors were: more focused on the things that matter in gaming, more willing to experiment with deviations from the formulas that will no doubt be established, and less focused on dominating their peers.