up until the wii, nintendos have always been powerhouses.

Who knows.

Truth though, there is no "catching up" involved. If Nintendo wanted to create the most powerful console, they could. The technology is out there, and Nintendo can buy a lot more of it that Sony, at the very least.

Thus, it's not "catching up" but rather "deciding to surpass."

Will Nintendo decide to surpass MS and Sony in the future?

They ususally do.

Nintendo will always try to keep their launch price at under 300 dollars instead of something ridiculous like 450-600+, that's all I can say, there is no reason a console should cost as much as the 360 or PS3 when they launched, more power, prolly, too much money? yes.

PLEASE STOP FAILING.

Nintendo made a profit off the GameCube, which is why the kept making the system. On top of that, they were selling GBA SPs like hotcakes and making a shitload off of Pokemon titles. Everyone acts as if Nintendo was on the edge of dropping out of gaming, which isn't true.

Power PC@485 Mhz > Modded Intel P3@733Mhz in raw performance, if you know how computers work, that's not news at all, what the Xbox had was a video chipset with more features and more storage space whereas the GCN had the raw performance and TEV, end result=GCN is a better polygon pusher and Xbox can make pretty effects easier(easier than TEV at least.) Xbox's memory was also slow ass so it really didn't do much on that front, it was a weak PC package and the price justified it.

edit: also, Catfang, mind doing more research before you say something like Nintendo was going out of business? this is not a troll forum, most people know actual facts and numbers, this is the stat site after all. Nintendo has always made money.

Exactly.

THE FINANCIAL PAGE
IN PRAISE OF THIRD PLACE
by James Surowiecki

DECEMBER 4, 2006

Fifteen years ago, the video-game industry was ruled by one player, Nintendo. The company had machines in a third of American homes, and it was Japan’s most profitable electronics company. The title of a 1993 book summed up the situation: “Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World.” Then the Sony PlayStation arrived, and everything changed. Today, Sony is the dominant force, and its chief rival is not Nintendo but Microsoft, which makes the Xbox. Two weeks ago, the début of Sony’s PlayStation 3 was greeted by crowds of hysterical consumers anxious to get their hands on the new console, billed as the most powerful gaming machine ever. When Nintendo’s new console, the oddly named Wii, appeared, a few days later, there were excellent reviews and expectations of good sales, but no more talk about world conquest. If Sony and Microsoft are the major-party nominees, Nintendo is more like a cool third-party candidate.
You might expect, then, that Nintendo would be struggling to stay afloat. After all, the prevailing wisdom is that companies need to be market leaders, or face disaster. This approach was famously institutionalized by Jack Welch, who, when he took over as C.E.O. of G.E., laid down a rule that he described as a “central idea” of his tenure: the company would quit any business in which it was not No. 1 or No. 2. The lesson that people took away from this was clear—third place is for losers. “First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado,” Alec Baldwin’s character says in the film “Glengarry Glen Ross.” “Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.” Nintendo, though, has not just survived out of the spotlight; it has thrived. It has five billion dollars in the bank from years of solid profits, and this past year, though it spent heavily on the launch of the Wii, it made close to a billion dollars in profit and saw its stock price rise by sixty-five per cent. Sony’s game division, by contrast, barely eked out a profit and Microsoft’s reportedly lost money. Who knew bringing up the rear could be so lucrative?
Sony and Microsoft are desperate to be the biggest players in a market that, in their vision, will encompass not just video games but “interactive entertainment” generally. That’s why the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 are all-in-one machines, which allow users not just to play video games but also to do things like watch high-definition DVDs and stream digital music. Sony and Microsoft’s quest to “control the living room” has locked them in a classic arms race; they have invested billions of dollars in an attempt to surpass each other technologically, building ever-bigger, ever-better, and ever-more-expensive machines.
Nintendo has dropped out of this race. The Wii has few bells and whistles and much less processing power than its “competitors,” and it features less impressive graphics. It’s really well suited for just one thing: playing games. But this turns out to be an asset. The Wii’s simplicity means that Nintendo can make money selling consoles, while Sony is reportedly losing more than two hundred and forty dollars on each PlayStation 3 it sells—even though they are selling for almost six hundred dollars. Similarly, because Nintendo is not trying to rule the entire industry, it’s been able to focus on its core competence, which is making entertaining, innovative games. For instance, the Wii features a motion sensor that allows you to, say, hit a tennis ball onscreen by swinging the controller like a tennis racquet. Nintendo’s handheld device, the DS, became astoundingly popular because of simple but brilliant games like Nintendogs, in which users raise virtual puppies. And because Nintendo sells many more of its own games than Sony and Microsoft do, its profit margins are higher, too. Arguably, Nintendo has thrived not despite its fall from the top but because of it.
Nintendo’s success is not an anomaly, either. The business landscape of the past couple of decades is replete with companies that have flourished as third wheels, and with companies that have struggled to make money despite being No. 1 in their industries. (Today, would you rather be Honda or G.M.?) And while it’s true that in many industries there is a correlation between market share and profitability, one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other. A recent survey of the evidence on market share by J. Scott Armstrong and Kesten C. Green found that companies that adopt what they call “competitor-oriented objectives” actually end up hurting their own profitability. In other words, the more a company focusses on beating its competitors, rather than on the bottom line, the worse it is likely to do. And a study of the performance of twenty major American companies over four decades found that the ones putting more emphasis on market share than on profit ended up with lower returns on investment; of the six companies that defined their goal exclusively as market share, four eventually went out of business.
The point is that business is not a sporting event. Victory for one company doesn’t mean defeat for everyone else. Markets today are so big—the global video-game market is now close to thirty billion dollars—that companies can profit even when they’re not on top, as long as they aren’t desperately trying to get there. The key is to play to your strengths while recognizing your limitations. Nintendo knew that it could not compete with Microsoft and Sony in the quest to build the ultimate home-entertainment device. So it decided, with the Wii, to play a different game entirely. Some pundits are now speculating, ironically, that the simplicity of the Wii may make it a huge hit. Nintendo wouldn’t complain if that happened. But, in the meantime, third prize is looking a lot better than steak knives.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/12/04/061204ta_talk_surowiecki

Also, Dahuman, I never said anything about Nintendo leaving the gaming business. I was only asking if they will surpass their competitors in graphics and hardware in the future. Don't twist my words around. And how was I trolling? I was only asking a constructive question, and I got well over fifty replies. And most of them were generating positive conversation. If I was trolling, people would be calling me horrible things.

In my opinion next generation will play similar to the following:

(Listing from most to least powerful)

Microsoft:

Since the Xbox 360's core base is comprised of people looking for experiences typically found on medium to high level gaming PCs, it's unlikely that Microsoft will risk losing the 40-50+ million core gamers they will have captured. It's also obvious they want some of the expanded audience. So I expect they'll try to be everything to everyone and have multiple SKUs targeted at different audiences. (With the lowest model coming with a 60-80GB hard drive)

Sony:

I expect Sony to have hardware that will be in between the successors to the Wii and 360. They have been burned pretty bad this generation with the PS3 and it's very doubtful they'll make the same mistake again. I think they'll attempt to come out with something that is creative and somewhat powerful rather than continue the arms race with Microsoft.

Nintendo:

I expect them to have the weakest hardware again since it's obvious their core audience as well as the expanded audience don't mind not having the latest and greatest hardware. In fact I expect their next system to be roughly equivalent in power to the Xbox 360.

These are all good responses. I believe Nintendo will continue their casual gaming market. Shame, though, as they once cared about core, casual, and other types of gamers in the past.