I've been a fool over the past 30 years, enjoying games that weren't in HD just beause they were fun!

You know what will be interesting and (somewhat) sad in the near future ...

Being that many of the critics of the Wii's processing capabilities are also the same people who argued that graphics weren't all that important when Nintendo had an advantage over Sony with the Gamecube and N64, I suspect that in the not-too-distant future when Nintendo releases their next console these same critics will be amazingly critical of it regardless of what Nintendo produces. While few critics would admit it, I think there is a long standing resentment of Nintendo that started in the SNES generation because of their unwillingness to embrace violent videogames on the scale that many (most of which now no longer exist and independent entities) publishers did.

 To make matters worse, the Wii receives additional criticism in a large part because Nintendo's success doesn't come from "Repairing" their relationship with these critics, but comes from appealing to a new audience that the critics always believed would eventually come around to seeing things their way. For generations many gamers believed that the way to convert non-gamers into gamers was to offer bigger, more complicated games with epic storylines and great visuals; and Nintendo gaining so much attention from these gamers with smaller, simpler games with no storyline and "obsolete" graphics is really a slap in the face of everything these gamers believe.

Pretty much nailed it. Developers are no longer really pushing new ideas as much as rehashing old ones. As soon as some non-Nintendo games really succeed on the Wii you'd see developers flock to the console. Not so much to make a new game but to copy whatever the success is. Video game making anymore isn't so much an art as it's copy-pasting proven selling points.

^^ I don't quite think it's that much of a conspiracy theory.

I'm sure it isn't one.

It doesn't take a bunch of cloaked figures having secret meetings to get conspiracy-like results. It just takes a lot of people with a similar mind-set and similar values which leads them to have similar reactions to the same issue.

It's called groupthink. You get an insular group of people who mostly deal with each other rather than outsiders. They meet with each other, read the same books, watch the same movies, play the same games (the ones the other game critics said were awesome, naturally). They start to share the same values, and ideas which are new to the group tend to get stifled or rejected. People who present these new ideas get marginalized. You present the group with a problem, and they'll tend to give the same answer.

It's a dangerous trap in all kinds of organizations, because it leads to stagnation and rigidity of ideas. It can look a lot like a conspiracy, but it's really just a group of people in similar positions drawing on the same pool of stagnant knowledge.

There is no reason to draw a distance object if you don't have the resoluiton to see it the start with. It's because HD has the ability to display more distance objects with greater detail is the reason it requires more GPU and ram the start with. HD and draw distance goes hand to hand.

Except it still looks just fine in HD.  Unless AC looks sufficently worse then AC2.

People don't have problems playing these games on SD tvs outside of text.

Reggie: "The conversation goes like this: 'We have a 22-million unit installed base. We have a very diverse audience… We have active gamers that hunger for this type of content. And why isn't it available?'"

Why is Reggie even asking this question, when he apparently knows the answer?

3rd party publishers don't want to pay the excessive expense of creating high-quality (which cost more) exclusives for a system which is wholly unlike its competition, and worse, make games for a hard-to-target demographic.  How many shooter fans does the Wii have?  How many assassin/platformer fans?  The numbers seem to suggest that, while the Wii, in general, has plenty of fans, they are, in fact, (to quote Reggie) "a very diverse audience".  In other words, they don't all like the same games, effectively limiting the number of buyers.

Draw distance doesn't really matter with Assassin's Creed because the actual play areas aren't that big. It would matter for Saints Row and GTA, but not AC.

AC works because it's a ninja simulator. Not the hack and slash kind in Ninja Gaiden and Shinobi, but the more stalk & kill kind.

So having a narrow fanbase is what gets those games. You've just described the red ocean perfectly.

But even a diverse base is still going to have a lot of buyers, so ignoring those is still stupid.