The Wii is dead. What will Nintendo do?

[Millennium]

Ah, still trotting out the "Wii = Gamecube 1.5" lie. Pity there's no validity to anything you've said, TC, but the fact that you're desperate enough to bring up this old chestnut is just icing on the cake.

The Wii's sales are indeed down, but only in lock step with the rest of the industry's sales: it's worth noting that even in the face of fewer unit sales, the Wii's marketshare has remained more or less constant. This is powerful evidence that the Wii's drop in sales has nothing to do specifically with the Wii at all, but is instead a larger condition affecting the entire market, like, say, a global recession.

Third party games actually sell stronger on the Wii than other consoles, and in fact even make more money. You can verify this yourself, by looking at game makers' financial straits: the few who are doing well are doing so on the strength of their Wii divisions, and those who ignore the Wii are hemorrhaging cash. Ubisoft has been quite open about the fact that it uses the money from its Wii division to fund its HD divisions, even as it claims out of the other side of its mouth that "third parties don't sell on the Wii." Funny how that works.

You talk about the Wii's lack of "processing power" as though the extra power of the HD twins went toward anything other than graphics. This is simply not true. Nothing that any HD game this generation has done, other than the graphics, would have been unimplementable on the Wii. Not even a real port of Dead Rising, not even LBP, and not even MAG. Even the PS2 got similar games (well, except for MAG, but with a similar number of active onscreen objects) late in its life; the Wii could certainly do it as well. That it has not is due to nothing more than halfhearted developer effort, because they want to go where the pretty pictures are.