Because after all these 2 years, there's people like you that can't and will never accept that fact that Nintendo was right, that Nintendo is doing things right  making fun of new gamers, hyping cinematic mediocre games, and that the hardcore-controlled industry is doing whatever it has to ignore and  make the wii look bad just because Nintendo was right.

And since when having creativity=drugs/illness?! Pathetic.

I´ll be looking forward to reading his essays if or when Nintendo is disrupted in the future.

The best statement I have ever heard from Maelstrom is this: his articles and posts act as a mirror for those who look at his writings. The viral marketers see a viral marketer, the elitists see an elitist, the poor analyst sees a poor analyst, the poor journalist sees a poor journalist, the fanboy sees a fanboy, the harsh critic sees a harsh critic, the careful scholar sees a careful scholar, the creatively inspired sees a creatively inspired person, and so forth. They do not know what he is, so they try to look at what he is from what they know. And when they see themselves reflected back at them, mistakenly believe that he is the embodiment of those traits instead of a looking glass that shows them only themselves.

I enjoy reading Malstrom's articles, but I think his focus on "Disruption" means that he misses the bigger picture ...

Even though the videogame market has grown over the years so that they're owned by a large portion of households, they have never become as ubiquitous in households as a television and they have never been used by the whole 'family' like a television is; this means that the number of videogame players in the western world has reached (maybe) 25% of the potential market.

From what I have seen there are two sides of growth in the market that the Wii is capturing, growth by putting a home console into a house where one has never existed before, and growth by getting more people inside of existing households to play videogames. To me this means that there is a massive opportunity to sell conventional games on the Wii because it is a system in households where there are existing gamers who enjoy those experiences, there is a massive opportunity to sell unconventional (or "Casual") games because "Non-Gamers" are more willing to buy and play the Wii, and there is a massive opportunity to sell "Cross Over" games that appeal to both groups because there are a lot of households with both types of gamers who enjoy playing games together.

Maelstrom has discussed the absorption of the existing market somewhat, but from the perspective of the existing market being absorbed AFTER the new market takes hold. I think his main shortcoming here is that he is looking at what people are supposed to be doing according to Blue Ocean Strategy and Innovator's Dilemma, without considering what people will actually do in an applied situation.

BOS I know does not make much mention of what happens when a product appeals to both the original market and the new market sufficiently that the overlap results in new and old customers alike wanting the product. Nor does it account for household dynamics and expanded userbases which use the same product unit as an existing customer but are still new customers in spite of that. He is flying blind, as it were, in that part if he's relying exclusively on BOS and ID, without thinking about the base-level practicality factor. His analysis is thus flawed in one key respect, but pretty thorough in most others.

For a man whose slogan is "make fun, not war", you certainly like to make war, Squilliam.

Also, I sense severe hypocrisy in your claims and statements. You say Malstrom does no fact-checking and makes strawman arguments, then you make a claim that clearly has no fact-checking at all and is a strawman argument that goes counter to all logic ("movies and games don't usually make a profit"; only a poor business keeps doing something that doesn't make them a profit). You criticize his writing style as pointless, yet your own writing serves no purpose save to incite needless debate (which is hardly a valued contribution). You complain that he's too verbose, but you posts walls of text in response to him.

Perhaps you should consider looking at what you do before you criticize what he does...

I’m  not sure if you read and/or understood this article which had nothing to do with who was right and wrong about the Wii two years ago. This was about the blindness some of the industry has shown by convincing themselves that 30 million people are this huge new alien species that just dropped in from another planet, or were too young, or too old to have ever played a “real” video game and therefore have nothing to do with their business.

 As long as this myth of this huge army of hardcore gamers who buy tons of games and play them 24/7 and this other group of casuals that never buy games and never actually play games at all persists we will see console makers continue to manage to at best make tiny profits that will never pay back development costs, or to lose so much that they finally abandon the business.  

As long as game developers believe that they must write super blockbusters only for the HD consoles and shovel crap at the casuals on the Wii, the more studios will close. Let’s look at game sales frome Gamenode http://www.gamernode.com/news/7340-the-top-selling-video-game-this-year-is/index.html :

Yep sure enough GTA 4 is the best selling game this year at 6.3M copies. Congratulations, {pause for applause}. Now you notice that SSBB isn’t all that far behind at 5.4 and MK Wii at 4.7 and even (shudder) Wii Fit at 3.6. Now I’m no industry expert but I’m willing to bet my mother’s virginity that in six-nine months all three of these will pass GTA IV. Now here’s the rub, GTA 4 cost allegedly $100M to produce, not even sure if that includes all publishing costs, but even so they’ll make some bucks for sure. Now I don’t know what SSBB cost to make and Nintendo will never talk but you reckon maybe it was less than $100M, maybe a whoooooooooooooooooooole lot less than $100M. Same goes for Kart and Fit. So those casual types seem to buy few games after all and I have to reckon maybe they actually play them because if they are so damned casual, why would they buy games and not play them.

Now of course we all know they only sold because they were Nintendo IP’s. Certainly there is a lot of truth in that for SSBB & KART but what about Wii Fit. It never existed so it could just as easily have come from Sony or Microsoft …. If they had that kind of imagination. So much for only Mario sells. The few really decent third party games have all exceeded their maker’s expectations. Personally I don’t care who writes the game. The first publisher that writes a really good FPS for the Wii (from the ground up – not ported) will probably do very, very well. After all, if all the Wii buyers are these brand new previous non-gamers how would they have such brand loyalty to Nintendo games. Or is it that Nintendo is the only one who so far who has taken the trouble to do a first class job?

I think that the sooner the industry takes a valium and some Maalox and actually reads that essay and understand what it says the better off they will be because there is no Magic Kingdom market out there, just fellow gamers that maybe are looking for a somewhat different experience than you.

Its commonly understood that creative works follow something of the order of an 80/20 rule, 20% of work in creative fields will net you 80% of the profit. It is also commonly known that most movies do not make a profit, nor do most games. You're failing to understand that this business isn't about the 70-80% of games that fail, its the 20% of games which succeed which more than make up for the ones that don't.

Btw, I hardly write more than a few paragraphs. I barely even flesh out my arguments. Furthermore this is a forum, debates are part and parcel of its existance.

P.S I wrote a few lines without a personal attack, you might try to not attack the poster next time yourself.

Video Game Analsyts, fuck'em all.