The Gamecube was not overpowered. The Xbox was more power than it. The PS2 was the weakest but it won because it was "too cool to fail". The Wii won thanks to casuals jumping on the motion control bandwagon. That's why it's sales died when the fad ended and casuals stoped caring when they moved on to some other fad.

I don't think any evidence is needed to say that the NextBox and PS4 will be several times more powerfull than the Wii U. Since the Wii U is barely more powerfull than the PS360 and MS and Sony are very unlikely to release machines barely better than what they already have on the market it's common sense that their next machines will be greately superior to the Wii U just as they will be to the PS360.

The Wii didn't lose sales because the "fad" ended, the Wii lost sales because third party publishers were never willing to give it adequate support ...

Beyond that, you can see evidence in the challenge Sony and Microsoft will face in their next generation consoles by looking at the Wii U. At launch the Wii used 13.7 Watts on average while the Wii U uses 32 Watts on average, the Wii U is (roughly) 40% bigger in volume than the Wii is, and the Wii was sold at $250 and Nintendo claimed to be breaking even while the Wii U is sold at $350 with Nintendo claiming to be taking a small loss.

If you start applying a similar increases to the XBox 720 to get similar increases in performance, you're looking at a gigantic 300+ watt system selling for $500 or more while pushing Microsoft to take $500 Million losses every quarter. Remember that (at launch) the power supply of the XBox 360 over-heated causing systems to shut down, and there were incidents of house fires being started from these power supplies; so expect constant news stories of countless house fires as people foolishly played the XBox 720 they bought.

The argument that Sony and Microsoft will be able to preserve their processing power advantage is based entirely on ignorance, and the question isn't whether or not Sony and Microsoft will be relatively less powerful in the next generation the question is how much less powerful they will be.

Um ok.

GCN was overpowered in comparison to the sixth generation winner. And Wii was underpowered in comparison to the seventh generation losers.

The Wii won because it was deemed the best and most wanted console by consumers. If Wii was a fad, it's a fad that lasted about 4 and a half years. That's pretty impressive. The Wii should be congratulated -- not chastised -- for introducing the world of video games to more people than ever before.

The next consoles from Sony and Microsoft WILL be more powerful than Wii U, but that's why the original article takes no amount of courage or insight, as I said. The question is: will that power come at too great a cost, and will that power tip the market in favor of Sony or Microsoft. The original article doesn't do much to unpack those questions.

I tried to take it serious, but I failed.

If anyone has doubts over it being next gen, then try out the Rayman Legends demo.

May I please stop having to reply to the same comment over and over again? Seriously, please.

8th Generation: 3DS, PS Vita, Wii U. Wii U IS next generation.

"Awwww, but it does not bring that kind of graphical improvements that are needed, blah blah". Nothing to do with "generation". If you want, you can say that, in your opinion, PS 4 and XBOX 3 (yeah "3", since it's the 3rd XBOX, until we have an official name... 720... lol... 14355! Bingo!) will be leagues and leagues ahed of Wii U. So much that nobody will want to play games on it. All the things you want. Again: nothing to do with generation talking.

I love my Wii U. You, clearly, don't love it and you don't want one. Again: nothing to do with generations.

Have a nice day.

Good Lord...

Oh and this, obviously.

Thank you.

Playing that demo on a full HD LED = mindblowing.

So the console that sold 100 million introduced more people to gaming than ever before than the handhelds and homes consoles that have sold over 100 million?  Go figure.

Oh, you mean all the "extremely scalable" engines, like UE4? That engines supposed to work on smartphones as well as a high end PC. And of course they're gonna show off the PC version, making people go "Ooooh", "Aaaahh", "woooow"

It's not evidence that's how PS720 will look.

Those specs you listed are obviously impossible at $299.99-399.99 because Nintendo just launched what you described but a much slower version and it costs $299-349 with a tablet controller, a tri-core CPU 1.24ghz, 1GB of system memory and a slower GPU than HD7770. You realize they are losing $ on the Wii U? That means the specs you outlined above for Fall 2012 wouldnt' have been possible at the prices you listed or would have meant NV losing hundreds of dollars on each console sold. If they wanted to release a way more powerful console with a tablet controller in 2012, they would have needed to price it at $500-600 to be profitable. The alternative would be to design a console with traditional controls and a lot more powerful hardware and perhaps as prices on tablets/screens drop, launch a Wii U GamePad in 2014-2015 like MS launched Kinect to extend the feature set of the console. Instead, Nintendo chose to use the controller as a key selling features rather than start off with a powerful console as a selling feature and then add the controller as a new feature to extend the appeal to other gamers that wanted something unique. Essentially Nintendo sacrified EVERYTHING in terms of GPU/CPU/HDD/System RAM/Video RAM components JUST for the controller tech to be there on Day 1.  They bet the marbles on the unique gaming experience rather than graphics. Unfortunately the developers are hardly taking the time to take full advantage of the controller's capabilities and just do half-assed 3rd party ports that run slow.