^--that is an elites attitude--i am better then the common man so why should he get what i have

I agree.  I don't understand why there are people out there that want videogames to be watered and dumbed down for the masses.  Those people who are patting each other on the back and cheerleading this will also be the ones asking what happened to videogames in about 10 years.

I haven't read the article yet, but I'm going to make a quick suggestion to people that don't agree with it:

Imagine what state the industry would be in today if Wii didn't exist. PS3 is losing tons of cash, and 360 took over a year and a half to finally start outpacing the original Xbox sales...the original Xbox which sold a mere 24 million units last generation.

"But Wii owners would buy a PS3 or a Xbox 360 if Wii didn't exist!" you say. How many would do so? Certainly not the ones that already own a 360 or a PS3...and also not all the old folks and moms that bought one... There's no way to know for sure, but compared to last generation either Nintendo has done a brilliant job of stealing sales from the other hardware makers, or the other hardware makers screwed up royally.

Why post if you couldn't even take the time to read the article this thread is based on?

Yeah, I'm responding to a thread.  On the basic argument of "is Nintnedo saving gaming?" I think it's very useful to look at just how badly the competition is performing.

I totally agree with him about Street Fighter II. That game was incredibly complex and fighting games as a genre have been used as an example of Nintendo's "controller inferiority" since the dawn of the GameCube era. All these buttons to play one genre of game.

Those who are elitist about gaming are what is wrong with the industry and deserve to be marginalized, personally I like that my family and friends are getting into gaming for the first time and are starting to understand why I enjoyed gaming for so long

Imagine (for a moment) what would the movie industry be like if the only people who were interested in movies were movie geeks ... Would anyone bother to make some of your favourite movies knowing that (no matter how good they were) they couldn't recover their costs?

Regardless of whether you know it or not, the success of Brittany Spears enables record labels to have 8 to 10 struggling artists touring under a recording contract; many artists (like Maroon 5) would have been dropped from their label after their first album flopped but were allowed to continue because of the money the popstars made.

A mainstream market produces growth in an industry (often uncontrolled 'cancerous' growth) which typically enables the portion of the industry you love to thrive; certainly, a new portion of the industry may be far more successful but it is unlikely that what you like will be lost.

 I imagine that video games would be just like they are now.

Now I've read the whole thing and I have two things to say:

- I pity the guy's kid...Eli 6.3? Seriously? :)

- I agree with him about review scores but I'm not sure he went into enough depth. There was an interesting bit on Penny Arcade this week where Gabe was saying how he tried to finish Assassin's Creed at top speed to see if it had an ending, and he started to see the game through a reviewer's eyes: it's not pretty. It's basically your job to speed-run dozens of games to completion every month. It's already counter-intuitive to how an average gamer like Gabe plays, and it's that much more counter-intuitive to how most people are playing something like Wii Sports or Mario Party.

Edit: I blew through Rayman Raving Rabbids in a couple of hours, but it's one of the best purchases I made, because it gets hauled out literally every single time I play Wii with my friends. That's how it sold a million copies.

its not actually a kid--its a robot he made from red ringed 360 and dust voided ps3-