Yeah, right. Console software sales are stronger than they ever have been, and the Wii is selling faster than any console ever before it. The console business isn't dying out; it's changing and adapting, and actually garnering a wider audience.
Also, everyone since the mid-'90s has been talking about convergence (i.e., devices that do multiple things, such as gaming smartphones, versus devices that do a single thing, like play games), and we've seen, time and again, that that's not what people want. Consumers are much more likely to buy simple, streamlined devices that do one or a few things easily, rather than a complex multimedia device that does a lot of things. Thus why the Wii is beating the media-center-geared HD consoles and why the DS is beating the PSP, which promised to be "the Walkman of the 21st century," despite the fact that both winning systems simply play games, and not much else.
Plus, how does he expect everything to be virtualized in 5 to 10 years when we still have yet to wean a large chunk of the population off of 56k, let alone provide fast enough broadband to enough people for it to matter?
"'Casual games' are something the 'Game Industry' invented to explain away the Wii success instead of actually listening or looking at what Nintendo did. There is no 'casual strategy' from Nintendo. 'Accessible strategy', yes, but ‘casual gamers’ is just the 'Game Industry''s polite way of saying what they feel: 'retarded gamers'."
-Sean Malstrom
