My point was that it is much easier to be the first in something when the industry was still growing. Today it's much difficult to innovate. If Wii U didn't do anything for the industry, then neither XONE or PS4 did.
Wii U also introduced Miiverse as an in-game integrated community with drawings and dedicated forums for each title, the gamepad as a home console concept and the experiences it spawned, the amiibo scanner and so on.
Even FAMICOM and Sega Saturn had online services.
Miiverse was an iterative feature first attempted by Sony with PS Home on PS3. That didn't quite pan out but the concept was about the same. Without it Nintendo would not have had anything to build Miiverse off of.
I'm certainly aware of the Netlink on Saturn, and Xband for SNES/Genesis and Sega Channel. Even the Satellaview. However I never said Dreamcast was the first to do online gaming either; it was just the first to solidify the idea into a workable, successful implementation. It also served as the backbone for Xbox Live, which took it even further.
And, I never said (or meant to imply) Wii U didn't bring any innovation. There is the Off-TV play and the Miiverse thing, as you mentioned. Amiibos are pretty neat and a different take on the Skylanders stuff that came before them. I would say PS4 has bought its own innovations or improvements on previous concepts as well (Share play/Share button, game streaming w/ PS Vita, PS Now), as has XBO (the Elite controller). However in the grand scheme of things those haven't had as much of an impact as a lot of what Dreamcast brought to the table, and your point about it being easier back then is both true and false, but an excellent mention.
It's true because there was more room to innovate, and tech was moving at a faster pace. However, it's also false because the crossover in different market segments we take for granted today was completely nonexistent back then. You didn't have the leveraging of similar chips, RAM, DSPs or system architecture back then by large majority of market competitors from a small pool of providers that we see today. Almost every chip in a commercial product these days comes from nVidia, AMD, Intel, etc. for example. Almost every architecture is either x86, ARM, or a variant of those, a huge bulk of products are assembled by Foxconn, etc.
It was
much more disparate back during the time of 6th gen, and architectures were extremely exotic. Therefore it required more upfront work on the part of the platform manufacturers (and more R&D into areas that are now handled by third party applications or services for a fraction of the cost) to get things running in sync. That's why, on that note, it was actually harder back then to a degree.
specs are largely unimportant.
[..........]
specs don't matter.
We're talking in regards the home console market though, not handhelds, which is why I left PS Vita, 3DS etc. out of the picture. They don't matter here. And if you want to get technical, specs matter to a degree where other shortcomings don't outweigh their importance, but they DO matter. PS Vita died because it had a stupid memory card format at an obscene price. PS3 struggled out of the gate because the price was too high, not because its specs weren't impressive. In fact it partially sold as well as it did early on because of its specs.
I think you already know the real reason Dreamcast didn't sell well enough; it's not because the specs didn't matter. The specs at the time were very impressive and part of the reason it did as well as it did. However it wasn't enough to offset Sega's damaged brand name or the ridiculous hype for PS2. If specs didn't matter, it'd of actually likely sold worst during its lifetime, because then you cut out a lot of early adopters, who tend to be technophiles anyway. Or look at it this way; if specs didn't matter, the Wii U would be selling better than it's been doing. However one of the chief complaints from early adopters and would-be early adopters was that it wasn't that much more capable than a PS3 or 360, so they rejected it. Early adopters set the trend for the more casual consumers to follow, which is where your argument of "specs don't matter", is really the only area where it applies :/
Regarding the Wii, it was a complete anomaly compared to the typical console cycle. It bypassed the usual pecking order but still managed to appeal to a lot of core gamers (early on) in spite of its lack of appealing specs, because they were already happy w/ their 360 and/or PS3 and didn't mind another console as long as it had something unique to offer, which the Wii did. They still got it because they could count on Nintendo to deliver good games for the platform. And all of this happened simultaneously with casuals buying it due to software like Wii Sports directly appealing to them, and the system's marketing campaign connecting with them immediately. It was so much of anomaly that Nintendo themselves did not honestly understand it, which is why they've been unable to recreate that success and arguably will never be able to do so again.
Saying specs matter or not depends on the specific market. We're talking about home consoles. We're talking about how the buying trends with those usually go. And in that specific context, specs have always mattered. If they didn't we'd never need more than an NES for our games.
