If the criteria for 8th generation is simply launch date then does that mean the revised 360 model launched late last year is 8th gen? Does a basic chinese cheap console that runs nes games but was just released last week also considered to be 8th gen despite having a performance level of the NES.
It's clear release date is a truly awful way of linking consoles together. One console could be a 1000x more powerful but they share the same generation. What is the point of that. So Ouya, wii u and PS4 are the same generation despite the Ouya not really being competitive with the games that were available on the original playstation.
Clearly the wii u is eighth generation but its performance level fits in better with the 2 most powerful consoles of the 7th generation.
I personally think it would be better to link consoles to their performance level. Both ps4 and xbox one have gpu's with over a teraflop of performance. They are the first two consoles to have that performance level. That means something. The wii u is down at 176gflops at the same approximate level as 360 and PS3 which were the first two consoles to break 100 gflops of performance. The gamecube only had 8 gflops of performance but the wii being a gamecube ran 50% faster managed to get to 12 gflops so it was in the same performance over 10 gflops performance level as the Original Xbox which was about 20 gflops. So you could represent consoles by gflops performance with each generation going up by a factor of 10. Maybe the next generation will exceed 10 teraflops.
It's unfair to consumers for the wii u to be represented as an eighth generation console as if that puts it in the same performance class as xbox one and ps4.
