Nintendo renders Sony’s progress irrelevant

[Domicinator]

I see it a tad differently--

The Wii turned into something that "grown ups" wanted to play too BECAUSE of games like Wii Sports and the Brain Whatever games. However, the same grown ups that bought a Wii to play those games also don't seem to ever play them again after the first or second party they have. Anecdotally from my own perspective:

I work at a software company. I would venture to say that 99% of all of my co-workers own one of the three consoles, a gaming PC, or a mixture of the two worlds. Needless to say, when the office isn't terribly busy, there is a lot of gaming talk flying around. Since there are a lot more PS3 owners than 360 owners there at the moment, a lot of the discussion centers around last night's session of MAG. When MW2 came out, it was about that. All the sports fans are talking about MLB 10 The Show or MLB 2K10.

When this conversation gets going, the Wii owners never seem to have much to say. Sometimes they make fun of us for getting in such nerdy conversations, which of course always spawns the comment, "Well, you have a Wii, so aren't you a nerd too?" And the answer to that is usually, "Yeah, I don't think the 3 times I've played it makes me a nerd." Differents situation: A family birthday party last weekend. My aunt got out the Wii so we could all play Wii Sports. I noticed that she had no idea how to work the thing and asked her how often she's played it since a year ago when she bought it. Once. One time.

I see the Wii as damaging to the progress of hardcore gaming, but for a different reason. The Wii hasn't made games more kiddie necessarily. The Nintendo consoles have always been perceived as more kiddie. What the Wii has done is make console gaming seem like more of a casual and trivial activity. Something you do only when you have people over. And for the people who are buying the Wii in droves, they are not seeing all the other amazing aspects of it, because Wii customers barely seem to know how to get their consoles online.

But what you have to be thankful for is this: Developers know the difference. They know there is a big difference between Wii gaming and all other gaming. And they continue to see bigger returns on the HD consoles. (Unless you're Nintendo, your games don't tend to sell too well on the Wii.) Therefore, we will continue to get lots of games on the other consoles. AND, if you have a little bit of Wii envy on your HD console of choice, you will soon have the option of motion control, which will probably be done better on both the PS3 and the 360 than it was on the Wii.

So I think you can relax.