The bottom line is that Nintendo essentially did two things:
1. Made one of the most innovative console moves since the creation of home video game consoles
2. Made a console almost exclusively for where THEY wanted to go and not where the industry wanted to go.
I love the Wii. For me personally it is my favorite out of all three consoles. But in this day and age in the industry, and it is safe to say this after almost 1.5 years, the industry doesn't want to be forced to change. They want GTAIV to largely be like GTAIII. They want Halo3 to largely be like Halo2. And they want Rockin' High Profile Shooter Title to be like Halo3 as well. This is what sells, this is what makes money. The DS succeeded in its quirkiness because at the end of it it was still the only viable handheld (before PSP started to take hold finally). With Wii, the PS3 and 360 are still viable.
I never understood the logic. It's cheaper to develop for the Wii. In the next few months it will have the largest userbase in every territory. You would think it prints money. But the bottom line is that developers DO NOT WANT to try and figure it out. They don't want to take risks on what game mechanics will and won't work on it. They don't want to take risks on what genres will sell on it. They don't want to figure out ways to move assets down to it.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that the Wii was too much at one time. It was essentially like going from the Atari joystick to the modern day controller for most developers. They were used to one stick and a button, and Nintendo gave them two analog sticks, a dpad, 6 face buttons, 4 should buttons and rumble. Everyone thought the developers would be like "Thank you nintendo! Finally someone gave us the tools we need!" Instead developers said "Umm.... fuck that. It's cool, but we're really not going to try and figure out what to do with that."
And why? Because companies like EA, Activision, Take-Two, and Square have built their vast fortunes on releasing new versions of game engines with very little changing in the way of user interaction and play mechanics.
The Wii will end the generation a success, probably the winner, and a great machine. I'm definitely not worried. But it won't be on the backs of Final Fantasy, Madden, GTA, or Tony Hawk. The Wii will succeed because of titles like Zack and Wiki, Trauma Center, No More Heroes, PES 2008, Nintendo published titles, WiiWare, VC, etc.
And that will really be the odd thing about this generation, and far away the most alienating to many hardcore gamers. That for the first time EVER in the industry, the lead console WON'T have the monstrous 3rd party titles on it. That Square and others WON'T be shifting primary support to the hardware leader. This really has to be a scary time for them.... because in this situation it is ripe for a NEW Square, Enix, Take-Two, Activision, etc to rise up on Wii and become a major player the same way those companies did in the past. (I left out EA because they ALWAYS have their hands in everything. Who knows, it could be them?)
People have been right from the start. The Wii is 75% expansion of the industry, 25% serving the existing masses with the classics. If that expansions becomes larger than the hardcore base that currently drives the industry, we could be in for some seriously strange times.
