| Squilliam said: Yep thats dominance at a close alright. Well, already closed as at whenever you feel like calling it. It sold heaps, quickly but then didn't have the puff the keep it going and in a sort of funny tortoise/hare thing it started getting outpaced. I wonder sometimes if a bit more performance and a modern GPU architecture alongside a couple more buttons might have seen it off at #1 well into 2011 if not indefinately.
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For a 4-5 year hardware life cycle (of optimal or rising sales, not past peak declining sales) it wasn't a bad strategy considering Nintendo made a healthy profit on every unit sold from Day 1. More profitable as manufacturing costs dropped with increased yields and any streamlining that may have happened to the hardware.
But yes, in terms of software support (third party, everyone knows Nintendo had a handle with games on their own hardware), I think the limited hardware specs (RAM and VRAM is another big constraint) relative to the competition in addition to the basic non-standard control scheme, directed most of the big soft franchises away from the platform.
Of course easy portability for the Wii with similar hardware specs (better processor, better GPU, more VRAM and RAM) would have meant that the Wii would have been either priced similarly to the competition or at a lower profit, possibly both. And that's just not how Nintendo makes its gold coins.
But, since this isn't a typical 4-5 year hardware cycle, we're beginning to see more of the problems with Nintendo's Wii strategy. Even if Nintendo dropped production today, the Wii couldn't be seen as anything but a monumental success for Nintendo given the number of units already sold and all the Nintendo published titles they sold.
