Do you think that Nintendo should continue hanging on to Gunpei Yokoi's philosophy?

[Mnementh]

Well, naturally people here are concenttrating on the 'withered technology' part. Gamers often think 3 more polygons make the experience so much better. But that is not that important, especially for a console. Zoombael is right, even PS4 and X1 use withered technology. The Gamecube was so much more powerful than the PS2, still it was withered technology. That helped that the Gamecube was robust, was cheap to produce (and in such profitable) and was good to program for.

A console that is not using withered technology will not work. Think you use cutting edge technology: some parts will be rare, as they are hard to produce. It will lead to production issues, demand cannot be fulfilled. It will lead to high heat output, that makes ventilation loud and the chips more prone to failure. And as the technology is not good understood, programming will be harder and therefore software will be expensive to produce and will be slow coming. That console would be a desaster. And what for? A year later the technology will be no longer cutting edge, but a console should last 6 years.

So it is clear that withered technology is a must have for gaming consoles.

But what about lateral thinking? Let's think about cars for a moment. At the beginning cars were evolving a lot. Car makers experimented with forms and ways to steer. But today most things have settled. Cars look more or less alike from the outside. They are all steered similarly. Only things changing nowadays are some optical features to follow trends, security technology and entertainment technology. No need to change anything, but cars as they are today are pretty much at an optimum.

If we project that to gaming consoles it looks similar. The way games are controlled are similar for some time now. You have a controller with two sticks, some face buttons, some shoulder buttons. Controls for many game genres are more or less fixed since many years. No need to introduce something radical new, as the way it is is already well working.

So my conclusion is: Withered technology is something to stick with. but as the time for the biggest innovations in gaming is over, lateral thinking can be relaxed. Not that something should be suppressed, like move controls as the Wii had. But as classical controls are evolved to be good, new ways should be additional options.