[QUOTE="CarnageHeart"][QUOTE="Bigboi500"]You'd have the low end and high end. Sony and Microsoft are middle-of-the-road tech that does not much more than copy Nintendo. There systems don't sell as much as Nintendo's systems, and their platforms have basically become rehash makers for EA and Activision. Outside of a few random exclusives they really don't offer much more that can't be found better elsewhere.
The next Sony and Microsoft consoles now seem nothing but a distant and half real rumor and if they ever do come out they'll either try to be as powerful as possible to try to keep up with the PC and be too expensive to sell well, or come out with weaker systems to try to appeal to casuals and make money in the market. They've already shown that they can't keep up with Nintendo in that department, and all they do is copy them and see fleeting success.
With only Nintendo and gaming PCs in the market you'd have developers who could be happy and make high-end software that caters only to one platform, without having to dumb it down to fit on pseudo-pcs. You'd also have Nintendo who does their own thing and makes hardware and software to fit their games.
El_Zo1212o
You're really let the fact that Nintendo won a single console generation (for the first time since Sony entered the market) go to your head. Your claims are especially curious given that the Wii has been outsold in various market by the X360 and the PS3 for the past year and a half or so. The Wii U looks to be following in the footsteps of the Wii, possibly minus the casual support (which given that it constituted 80% of Wii sales, is a big deal).
Contrary to your claim, Nintendo can and has misread the casual market before. Nintendo's Wiimote+ (and Sony's Move) revealed a misunderstanding of the casual market (both were made with the belief that casuals wanted more precision) but MS's Kinect read them correctly (it assumed they cared nothing about accuracy and wanted fewer buttons). Its not clear that the Wii U's tablet/controller mix (the most complicated controller yet release, one that goes against the design philosophy of the Wii) will capture the imaginatio of casuals.
Last but not least, due to the monomaniacal focus of many of the minority of the Wii's core gamers (most Wii owners are casuals) on Mario and Zelda, the market for games outside those franchises is miniscule. That coupled with the last gen hardware and simplified controller is why 3rd party developers with any amount of talent have either avoided or quickly abandoned the Wii and why Nintendo has offered up fewer new core franchises than ever before despite the fact that the Wii is their most successful console ever.
If third parties had no alternative but to deal with a publisher as actively hostile to third parties as Nintendo (who else openly talks smacks about indie developers, the sorts of people who make games like Journey, Minecraft and The Walking Dead?) then the console industry would die.
People don't seem to get this part- Wii was a casual console. The whole point was to get the one-off demographic "casual gamer." It was a one-off because the casual gamer has no interest in upgrading to the bigger better thing. The Move and the Kinect failed in comparison because of that fact. The core gaming populace is now getting their turn with the Wii U(and I still think it was a big mistake associating the two consoles with the name Wii since their target audiences are so widely separated). Have you seen the Wii U pro controller? It's an Xbox 360 controller with symmetrical sticks and a solid D Pad. Wii U is really the antithesis of the Wii- targeting the core gamer and tossing scraps to the casual. When you reference the 80% casual userbase of the Wii as a point of worry for the Wii U, you completely ignore the fact that the Wii had very, VERY little to recommend itself to the core gamer. The only non Nintendo core games I can think of for the Wii were Red Steel 2 and Madworld, and by the time they rolled around, core gamers the world over had already written off the Wii as a casual-focused gimmick box. Wii U, on the other hand, is announcing games like Batman: Arkham City, Assassin's Creed 3, Aliens: Colonial Marines, and more. The Wii U is the opposite of the Wii in terms of the target demographic and the family friendly focus. Maybe the U stands for "U-turn"?Kinect is a creative failure, but so was the Wiimote and that doesn't seem to have stopped either from capturing the imagination of casuals. The Kinect's sales were 18 million eight months ago, making it far and away the most commercially successful peripheral ever released despite its high price.
In terms of core games, the Wii followed in the footsteps of the GC (after the commercial disappointment of Pikmin and Eternal Darkness, Nintendo pretty much gave up on original games). There was lots of Mario, a little Zelda, the odd Metroid game, one third party that sought to iceskate uphill (last gen Capcom, this gen Sega).
Wii U seems to be aimed at the Wii's core gamers. PS3/X360 unmoved by the dozens of Marios and the handful of Zeldas and Metroids on the Wii aren't going to be excited about such franchises coming to the Wii U, nor are they going to care about the Wii U getting some of the same games they enjoy (or enjoyed in the case of Arkham City) on their current hardware.
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