I have seen countless “experts” and “visionaries” in my life who were neither experts nor visionaries, and they built their reputation largely due to luck; you can often guess the way something will happen using reasoning which is very fragile to change, true experts and visionaries see the future more clearly because they use much more robust reasoning.
Now, most of these (so called) “experts” in the industry have believed so heavily in the PS3 and Xbox 360 because in the past people have moved from one generation to the next in a large part because of the improvement in graphics. What a lot of them have never considered is that this motivation was going to end at some point; in the very near future we will be able to produce nearly photo-realistic graphics at 60fps, at 1080p with 16xAA and 16xAF (say a dual sli Geforce 9 or 10 set-up). Being that the Wii offers most of the features the average person associated with advanced 3D graphics (fully textured environments, pixel and vertex effects, full facial animation, etc.) most “experts” have over-valued the processing power of the Xbox 360 and PS3.
Beyond that, a lot of the “visionaries” in the industry have focused on incremental improvements in gameplay and major improvements in graphic and marketed these games towards the “core” gamer demographic; the overall result of their efforts has been to bore a large portion of the “core” gamer demographic while alienating the much broader “mainstream” gamer and ignoring the emerging “non-gamer” market. The Wii contrasts their general strategy and encourages new gameplay which attracts the bored gamers whils at the same time appealing to the markets they have ignored or alienated.
