I don’t wish to see any system fail or any gamer loose access to the type of games they prefer. But whatever market share Nintendo has gotten they earned honestly by creating a fresh new innovative and exciting system with great accessibility and a moderate price. It took needless control complexity out and put the fun back in.
Conversely, whatever market share MS and Sony have lost (and they aren’t doing all that badly), they gave away by overpricing, placing technology over fun, and allowing the games to become more and more inaccessible through overly complex completely non-intuitive controls. Somehow the game part of games was being swallowed up by the mechanics and technology of gaming. The results were mighty pretty but not a lot of fun to play. The games demanded too much of a learning curve that not everyone had time for. Why is the Wii thought of as a great party console? Because anyone can pick up a controller and in minutes be into the game. With a PS3 or Xbox 360 game they would be lucky to get through the tutorial before the party was over, if they could play it at all and many couldn’t.
That’s a steep price in terms of time commitment just to play a game and even after you did you found yourself playing the same old FPS with prettier graphics but the same tired old concepts. Last night I found myself in a debate with some “hardcore” types who were convinced that Left 4 Dead was revolutionary and exciting because of the way in had improved the co-op mode. That’s not revolutionary, that’s refinement, revolutionary was Wii Sports when you found you could play just by doing what came naturally. No frustration, no tutorial just fun. You can claim MK is just the same old game in a new version and in part that’s true but driving with the wheel is a fresh new experience and a hell of a lot of fun. Boom Blox has more originality than almost any HD game I’ve seen.
Fresh, new innovation and fun were the things I had found harder and harder to find in gaming and why I gave away my PS2 and quit buying computer games. I’d been there and done that going back to Pong and I was giving up gaming. That is I had given up until I played Wii Sports at a friend’s house and realized I was having more fun in an hour than in the last decade of console gaming. Now I have all of the good games, all the gadgets and I play more, and enjoy it more than anything since those days when all games were intuitive and designed for fun.
Without the Wii, I would not have bought ANY system this generation so the Wii didn’t take me away from Sony or Microsoft. The Wii brought me back into gaming. In fact, I doubt that Sony and MS would be doing significantly better without the Wii. They would rule supreme over a pastime that would be slowly dying as more people left and fewer joined. I hear a lot of “the Wii killed gaming” bunk. I think more likely, the Wii saved gaming.
