Global Hardware + Software Up (Ending Dec. 1) After Black Friday sales

[mrstickball]

Conegamer said:

MDMAlliance said:

But if he were saying that the loser of next gen was next gen, why not include the next consoles from Sony and Microsoft?  We know they're coming.  There's also Ouya.  Saying it the way he did doesn't seem like he meant to call the generation itself a loser generation.  Especially in context to this thread, it seems to be sales-related.

Yeah I'm 99.9% certain he meant only those consoles, so I guess you could call it ridiculous that he's damning the sales of all current gen consoles when one has yet to be out for a month anywhere and another has hit 25mil in 18 months, when we don't even know the names of the other systems, let alone anything else.

I've already seen enough from the WiiU to determine how its future is likely to play out. My three primary issues with the system and it becoming significantly adopted this generation are:

1. Disruption. The Wii significantly disrupted last generation due to motion controls. The WiiU does not. The tablet isn't a significant game-changer, especially when Microsoft and Sony moved laterally and have essentially offered comparable concepts via SmartGlass.

2. Technology. The WiiU is essentially last-gen. Its true the Wii was (arguably) as well, but its control scheme negated that issue until late into its life cycle. With online gaming being the huge growing segment of the gaming population, Nintendo has not properly prepared the device for this transition. The 8GB SSD card is a very big downside. This is going to be their achilles heel, as 3rd party publishers are going to have a growing appetite for the lucrative DLC market. We've already seen the vast majority of publishers fail to pledge new DLC to the system, and this is very scary.

3. Publishers. Go look at a list of 3rd party exclusives for the WiiU. Go ahead. How many games are exclusive to the WiiU vs. X360/PS3 only? Most are. This should be very scary, as its an essential re-hash of last generation. Add points #1 and #2, and it'll be very difficult for publishers to want to develop on the WiiU when its technology will be weaker than the other two (costing more time to port any title to the system), and offer fewer benefits as to what the Wii did - namely huge unit sales.

You can disagree with me and call me names all you like, but lets have this discussion in a few months and see how far off I am.