Will the Wii have 10 year lifecycle before the new console introduced?

[Erik Aston]

Rol and SkyRender are talking sense.

@Almost everyone else: GAAAAAAH!!!

First of all, I laughed when I saw Yushire's comment that Malstrom "plays it safe." The man published an article called "Why Wii Won" during launch week in November 2006, before any sales data had come out.

And to the general misunderstandment:

Wii is right now destroying all the conventional wisdom about the VG market. Eventually, it will establish a new conventional wisdom.

This new conventional wisdom will also be wrong! Nonetheless, the whole market will fall in behind it. They'll be a bunch of fitness games, for example, but they will either be many times more expensive to develop than Wii Fit, or they will not sell as well due to competition, or both. Obviously, this is a superficial imitation of Wii, as it only mimics the particular values like practical use, social play and special controllers, but ends up recreating the "red ocean" of old.

Eventually, all the competition will lead to new Wii-alike consoles being launched. Just like 360 and PS3 are struggling against PS2, just like PS1 outperformed Gamecube for a few years, just like NES outsold Genesis until after SNES had launched, the new batch of Wii-alikes won't make much headway against Wii. (Neither will Xmote, btw.)

In the meantime, Nintendo will make a console aimed to surplant and render irrelevant all the values of Wii! It will compete with non-consumption, not with the other 8th gen systems that come out. And so Wii will last longer than any console in history because it will remain the standard-bearer for the "old" values basically forever. It will only die when Nintendo's new system succeeds in surplanting those values.

And it will do so first with a bunch of revolutionary new games, and then with "bridge" games, which will be new iterations of Mario, Mario Kart, Zelda, Brain Training, Nintendogs, Wii Sports, Wii Fit, etc., which will contain the new values of the new system to slowly bring the old players over. Just like some old gamers are starting to be converted to Wii's and DS's values with games like Phantom Hourglass and Mario Kart Wii.

The pertinent question is not WHEN this will happen, but WHY this will happen. There are only 2 reasons, and someone already explained them above...

Edit: it was Rol:

1) A competitor is about to launch a new system which offers a way to play games that gets people excited. In that case Nintendo has to be ready. Note that the competitor's system has to be more than a Wii 2.0 to be a threat to Nintendo.

2) If pretty much everything that can be done on the Wii has been done and things are going to become stale, Nintendo has to introduce a new system to renew interest in videogames. Note that the new Nintendo system has to be more than a Wii 2.0 to succeed.