I'd just like to clarify, that I am not attacking the Wii.  I just don't think the Wii does enough to dominate this generation.  The online isn't very strong, the graphics are last-gen, third parties aren't making as much money as 360/PS3 games, and casual gamers by definition don't buy a lot of games.

I am not saying I'm not going to have a lot of fun with the Wii.  I knew that had I gotten an N64 or Gamecube that I would have had fun with it.  The Wii certainly does overcome the barrier for me by providing a unique control system out of the box and continuing to provide the great Nintendo games, and being backwards compatible means I can go back and enjoy those other games for GC and through the VC (if over-priced...*sigh*).  But the point of this thread is that many on this forum have been overestimating the domination, in many peoples' opinions.  Obviously, that means a lot of you are going to disagree.

We'll just have to see how it plays out, but I just feel like the PS3, and even the 360, can do more than the Wii when it comes to providing different variety of games well.

 Your clarifications really dont' make much sense, however.  Nintendo's online system has plenty of time to continue to develop, and the sheer fact that development costs are so low on the system means that its actually easier for third party developers to make a profit, even if less people are buying each individual game.  

 However, as the system continues to sell millions of units, there will be more and more people willing to buy games on a regular basis, especially once developers come out with Wii games that have the benefit of a full development schedule, which isn't the case just yet because the system took developers by surprise. 

 The fact of the matter is that most 3rd party developers expected the Wii to be another GC, and it certainly isn't.  As a result they have been scrambling to throw out whatever they can to make a profit on the system.  In addition to throwing out shovelware, however, you have games in development that are taking a full cycle; namely 2 - 4 years, and that would be why you haven't seen all that many great games as of yet.  

 This really isn't that hard to understand.  Once there are games worth buying, people will buy them.  It costs less to develop a game on the wii compared to the HD consoles, so there is less overhead for a developer to have to overcome in order to turn a profit.  Third parties are not about to abandon the wii, because of these lower costs in addition to the ever increasing massive player base.  This obviously has a snowball effect, as well; the more good games it has, the more gamers buy the system.  The more gamers buy the system, the more money developers make.  Etc.

Sure, better hardware always helps. But there is a very important concept which is the "law of diminishing returns". From a certain point, more hardware doesn't help much for certain types of games. The trick in designing hardware and a console's development environment is to find a compromise between:

- ease of development (in order to reduce development budgets) - Nintendo scores much higher than MS/Sony here, and MS scores a bit higher than Sony

- graphical ability (in order to make people's jaws drop) - Microsoft and Sony score higher than Nintendo here

- hardware cost (in order to be able to sell a lot of consoles) - Nintendo scores higher than MS/Sony here.

Nintendo found their compromise, Sony and Microsoft found theirs. Now you, as a customer, can vote with your money on which compromise you think is best. Obviously, most people are voting on the Wii as you can see by the sales figures.

PS: I'll take Galaxy's graphics over Ratchet and Clank's any day.

I think that 'making more money' from XBox 360/PS3 games is highly questionable being that it cost 3 to 4 times as much to develop a similar game on the XBox 360/PS3 as it does to produce a game for the Wii, and most third party efforts have been much smaller in scale on the Wii than XBox 360/PS3 projects. A game like Rayman Raving Rabids probably cost 1/10 as much as it cost Ubisoft to produce Assassin's Creed and yet it will have sold 1/3 to 1/2 as many units (meaning the return on investment is probably 3 to 5 times larger for Rayman); at the same time Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition and Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles together probably cost less than 1/4 the development cost of Dead Rising, and yet Dead Rising will not outsell either game by a ratio of 4:1.

The fact of the matter is developers care about RETURN ON INVESTMENT because that is what their stock holders care about; if a company spends $40 Million to make a profit of $20 Million they're a far worse investment than a company who spends $2 Million to make a profit of $10 Million.

@Windbane: I too am praising how SMG, or MP3 for that matter, looks like, but it's not the graphics, art style or sound, that makes those games good. Few great games for example that don't have (and never had) the state-of-the-art graphics and sounds, and still are great games, are Tetris and both Brain Trainings. One of the greatest last generation games was one with worst graphics, Eternal Darkness, and it definately wasn't the graphics or multi-channel audio, what made the game great. If the game would be released with photorealistic 1080p graphics and 7.1 audio, it wouldn't be any better.
One of the reasons why gaming industry has been in decline, is that games try to be interactive movies. You get higher graphics, more videos and less gameplay. As what it comes to gameplay, online has been increasing the replay value, but outside of that, the basic content has been decreasing. Also decreasing the gameplay value makes sense in business sense, the USA:n industry figured it out more than hundred years ago; if you make crappy product, which will break after certain timeframe, the customer is forced to buy a new product. So the less gameplay makes your customer to buy a sequel of a game earlier and 10 hrs of content is cheaper to make than 20 hrs.
Nobody isn't also saying that better graphics wouldn't be better, even i would pick the version with better graphics if i have the option and games are the same by any other way (including price).

Actually Wii can provide more variety (by default) than it's competition. It may have more limits in terms of power, but it does have less limits in terms of controls. And besides, if we look at games this far, Wii has provided the most variation.

As what it comes to sales numbers, comparing to previous generation, 360, Wii and PS3 compete from the around 200 million customers, but Wii also is the only one, that is trying to expand the audience outside this 200 million. At the moment it looks like Wii is going to win the majority of those 200M and after that it has the group outside the box as a target. So, even if 360 would sell 100M and PS3 another 100M, Wii would have the potential to sell double of them combined. But nobody knows how people outside the gaming community is going to get excited about the Wii, after all that audience is unproven territory.

About online, Wii has the best online features out of those 3, which will definately help to sell consoles to the non-gaming audience. But as for online play, in a way, it's not on par with competition. Anyway, it's stupid to assume, that it won't change to better, since Nintendo has said, that there will be some changes. Of course, nobody knows the timeframe and what will the changes turn out to be like.

KB+Mouse isn't any better. No analog controls, no 3D pointer, hard to use, doesn't feel natural and Wii Remote +Nunchuck really has balls compared to keyboard+mouse.

The R&C gives you the "wow moments" mainly because of it's art direction/how the game is made. Of course it's easier to give the (graphical) wow moments with higher power. But i don't think you like R&C because of the wow moments it gives you.

I don't understand this statement.

Aren't those moments where the game simply amazes and wows you part of the fun of video gaming?

With this logic, every game ever released would be a niche game...

I've been following graphics for a long, long time.  When voodoo graphics was released, I was right there playing GLQuake on my 28.8k modem.  When Unreal came out, I spent time graphics-whoring that.  I had an N64 and thought that, because it was so much stronger than the PS graphically, it would have better games.  I remember prefering Quake 3 Arena to UT, primarily due to several rendering technologies that I thought were impressive and were the pinnacle of rendering at the time.

Graphical improvement is an inevitability.  The particular styles -- including attempts to make models, textures and actions as realistic as possible -- gain and lose popularity with the season.  I believe that realism, in particular, will begin to significantly lose popularity this generation or next.  This is nearly here nor there, but it is perhaps an example of how tastes change when you can finally do things you couldn't do before.

My point is that pushing the envelope graphically no longer makes sense.  Let the fillrate, clock frequency, and bigger memory come to you.  Let your developers work within more realistic bounds to keep profitability reasonably attainable.   All else equal, improving graphics and sound makes games better.  All else being equal, improving control and gameplay makes games better.  But If I had to choose between the two, I'd take the later every single time.

Video gaming is a niche hobby so everything in it is a market sub-segment of an already small niche.