lol,I blame ninjabread man.

The problem here is that you actually consider the Wallstreet Journal or New York Times to be real news.  That was a good one though. 

Also, Nintendo spent the last 2 generations in the dump?  They have made money with every generation so how can you say that?  Just because their systems were not widely accepted did not put them in the dump, they were very successful despite not selling as much as they would have liked to.

The problem here is that Words of Wisdom assumes his idea of a game is the only "real game". He's threatened by the influx of new gamers into his field of entertainment and retaliates by insulting them with porous analogies.

If Words of Wisdom was a real gamer, he'd better understand what a real game truly is. Instead, he's an elitist gamer determined to subject his philosophy of gaming as fact rather than opinion.

The problem is that money is not the only goal in business.  There is a very good reason why businesses divide their objectives between financial and strategic.  One objective represents money/value and the other represents everything else.

Nintendo may have made a steady profit during the past two generations but they lost out on brand-name recognition and market-penetration.  There are now two full generations in today's market who see the Sony and Playstation names as synonymous with gaming because for the past two generations, they have been.  Consequently, there are a lot of people who write Nintendo off without a thought.  You need only read some of the Sony Discussion forums to see those people.  They grew up with Sony, not Nintendo, and as they grow older and buy more games, should they stay loyal to the Sony/Playstation brand, that will hurt Nintendo greatly in the long run.

So yes, Nintendo was in the dump for a couple generations.  

I think at this point in time there are two types of games being produced for the Wii by major third party publishers; decent efforts which attempt to take advantage of the Wii, and quick cash-ins that begin after an executive says "Crap, that thing is still popular?" ...

In my opinion, about 2/3 of games produced for the Wii by major third party publishers in 2007 fell into the quick cash-in category and (from what I have seen so far) this looks like it will fall to 1/3 in 2008. It is annoying to see third party publishers still ignoring the Wii after it has been dominating the market for 18 months, but the only thing we can do is buy and promote the decent games that are produced for the Wii ...

 This is utter nonsense.

The last two generations, Nintendo sold tons of GameBoy and GameBoy Advance. So NO, they didn't lose a lot of brand-name recognition, only market penetration.

Anyway, for Nintendo, financial goes hand in hand with strategic, as it seems you didn't notice.

The very core of the company is based on this simple principle. If they don't make fun games that people want, on a console they designed, they die.

Your loyal Sony/Playstation lovers are just fanboys. Fortunately for Nintendo (and Sony at the time), they're a minority. You need only look at my brother, he sold his PS2 without a thought and bought a Wii, despite growing up with Playstation, on which his sole interest was playing PES or FIFA, football games.

Nintendo specifically distanced his new consoles from its previous brands, at least in commercials. No more Nintendo Home Console or GameBoy, that's Wii and Nintendo DS now. Sometimes it's just DS.

So no, Nintendo wasn't in the dump at all the two past generations, as they made tons of money and it didn"t affect the outcome of this current gen.

The only ones for whom you could say they were in the dump are developers. 

Market size PS3-360-PC(Steam users only) = 40 million (growing at the same rate or faster than the Wii.) Eventually it will cost practically nothing to port between the Xbox and the PS, so to a third party they can be counted on as one unified console in terms of selling power.

Market size Wii only - 23 million.

Look at the top 50 games currently, 2 3rd party games. One is NMHeroes and it's sold poorly. It may not even crack half a million.The other is Carnival games, which has been mentioned as shovelware.

The Wii is a victim of incompatibility. No man is an island they say, so the lack of a decent GPU has really hurt the chances of getting 3rd party support, they could have put in a r300 for crying out loud! That gpu was initially being designed for a Nintendo system! Furthermore, we wouldn't be having this discussion had they not been so cheap on the graphics. If games like Assassins creed, could have been ported to the Wii without reworking ALL of the art assets, then they proabably would have ported it. Art is the most expensive area of development today.
If my broken Wii was working I would count myself as a Wii gamer also. (Damn fragile console not withstand being stood on) I think that the problems of today are caused by the fact that Nintendo, being a conservative company... Did not expect it to sell as well as it has.

^_^