Actually the userbase and the revenue is too, look at total revenue for gaming for the last 3 years in the US....

Heck, look at NPD monthly revenue numbers, every month we get 30 to 50% better than last year and last year was a record year.

The gaming industry is not different than any other industry. As Revenue grows there will be consolidation and production costs will increase wether due to HD or not ( Madden and GH production costs have increased tremendously over the last years and it has nothing to do with HD, it's just a tool publishers use to bar the competition from competing with them).

Bottom line of economics is you very rarely can have for a susbtained amount of time companies spending little money and making huge amount of profits except in quasi-monopoly markets. Otherwise some new companies will always step in and the profit will fall..

What we are seeing in the gaming market is no different from what you see in any others market as it matures. The amateurs/company badly run will slowly phase out or get bought and more and more the market will be dominated by big companies...

What you are suggesting is that Nintendo actually cares about small developers and that is probably far from their mind, all they care about is reporting record earnings to their shareholders and making their company as powerfull as possible...

It all comes down to recognizing the overshoot point for a market...

HDTV and HD video adoption rates have been atrociously low, to the point that firms manufacturing HDTV sets have actually gotten the US government to intervene in order to push sales. In business, we call that a "red flag". See, if your product doesn't sell unless it's forced into being the standard by government decree, that means that your product is not wanted. Forcing people to adopt something they don't want doesn't work for very long; eventually an alternative comes along which people flock to, and the market forcing users to upgrade collapses.

The short of it: HD overshoots the market so badly that forced adoption is the only way it can become a standard. Meaning it's so precarious that all it would take is a simple alternative to completely collapse said market or reduce it to a severe niche. Now why would you make support for this format a standard feature, with that in mind?

wow...how pathetic you ar indeed

I stopped reading once you started about growth....use that thick coconut on that neck of yours to actually read this.:

growth is all due to Wii and DS...if they did not exist...there would NOT be a profit growth in the gaming industry right now...sorry...

what a fool..

Wii games looks great on my 32 inches HDTV, I use the 480p cable. I have no complains about the graphics

HD TVs, HD formats and HD Gaming are the wet dream of most 15-25 year old male technophiles whose philosophy is essentially, "Bigger and better is the way to go, who cares how much it costs."

Secondarally the HD arena appeals to the 25-35 year old single male who has found financial stability and insists on owning the best of whatever media medium emerges. You know the typical guy you talk to who bought a PS3 for the Blu-Ray and owns a couple games but can't even name them off the top of his head all the while saying he's not really a gamer anyway.

Now this is not to say the HD phenomenon is totally without outlying appeal or utility for the market, but here in North America for the most part it fails to appeal to the core consumers who matter, the typical american and the american family. We have this confusing array of terminologies, Digital TV, LCD TV, HD TV, Widescreen TV, Flatscreen TV, 1080i, 1080p, and all these commercials for HD TVs, each with its own bazaar snake oil technology that makes its unique in the market which only furthers to confused the already intimidated consumer.

Instead of streamlining the development of HD for TVs, all the companies are going in their own little direction basically forcing anyone daring enough to buy one to use a complicated chart to figure out what they're willing to sacrifice or compromise on for the features they want. Just watching the simplified explanations on the demo TVs at Meijers and Walmart are baffling in themselves. Why can't they just make one kind of do everything ultilitarian HD TV? The Consumer is confused and if any actually have any desire to own a HD TV most are probably waiting for some sort of standardization to occur so they're not stuck with something they may latter regret.

I don't care if HD TVs make sense to you and are simple to you, they don't to the core consumer.

@Onimusha12: It's simple... The savvy customers will think a lot before they buy a TV. The rest of them will just pop into the shop, see what's on display and take the biggest/prettiest TV, probably ignoring what HD actually is.

These customers will happily watch SD sources while thinking they're taking the most out of their TVs, never caring much about quality. They have a huge flat TV hanging on the wall and that's all they care about.

that's a good point NJ5

I thought the reason the Wii wasn't an HD console was because Nintendo didn't make it an HD console....

I agree with Nintendo that HD output is totally unimportant. I only wish the Wii had 256MB or so of memory, instead of 88+3MB, and that the processor was perhaps clocked closer to 1GHz, and the GPU closer to 350 MHz. Oh... and that it played DVDs -- it would totally replace my PS2 as my primary DVD watching device if it could.

If Nintendo had gone the extra mile, and done most of those things (more memory, slightly faster GPU, DVD playback would be enough), the Wii would utterly dominate both the casual AND hardcore markets right now.

They didn't need to make a 512MB, multi-core 3.2 GHz CPU, 500+ Mhz GPU, HD-capable monster -- but they did set the bar just a bit too low, IMO. I think with a little extra "oomph", publishers would have been all over it for hardcore games by now, and the other two consoles would be utterly out of the picture.  I think the Wii is just a tad too weak for its own good.  A little more power would give it the legs it needs to stomp out the competition completely.  As is, it'll never manage that kind of triumph (like the PS2 did), despite being a good seller.

A lot of people seem to have trouble accepting that for some reason.