Lifespan of the Wii?

[albionus]

Wow, a debate over whether the SNES or Genesis is more powerful, am I back in grade school? The Genesis was only more powerful in that it could have the CPU and GPU process seperate frames at the same time allowing for faster scrolling. In every other way the SNES was more powerful. It had more colors, more sprites, way better sound, more RAM, ability to do scaling and rotation (good ole Mode 7), could handle more planes, etc etc. All you have to do is look at the games to see which is more powerful, which is why I never understood how it was quesitoned in the first place. As for the Wii's lifespan, I don't see any reason why it won't be 5 years. HD penetration isn't even moving Bluray/HDDVD movies and movies are a much bigger interest for most people with HDTV. If they aren't even rushing out to buy HD movies why would they rush out to pay extra for HD games? What I could see being released in 2-3 years is a Wii Plus. With the regular Wii dropped to $100-150 I wouldn't be surprised is they release one with 4 GB onboard storage, companent cables, Wii Sports/Health/Music provided on storage, I'd say some type of movie playback but supporting either BluRay or HDDVD would mean supporting a rival so I don't know about that. I think the Wii breaking 80 million is pretty much a certainty, it's grabbed the casual gamer market the PS2 had and so that should be it's low end. The casual gamers are not going to a system over $250, the PS3 will only reach that at the end of this generation if it ever does and the Xbox won't reach it for years and it doesn't have any casual appeal. It should also sell well to hard core gamers since a $100-250 system isn't too much to add a diferent experience to their $400-600 systems. Indeed, if the PS3 and 360 split the hard core market while the Wii sell as a 2nd system to 60% of hard core gamers it would actually outsell the HD systems in their own primary market. The bigger question is how many non-gamers will keep coming and how long will they stay. Also we'll have to see how developing countries shape up. With it's much lower cost and also importantly it's much lower dev cost the Wii will be about the only system able to take advantage of those markets. If all those go the right way I could see 160 million sold being a possibility for the Wii. More realisticaly I'd say 120 million over 6 years.