Personally, my Wii collected dust–the first party wasn't strong or interesting enough to hold my interest, and third party often felt like sad ports. Eventually, I ended up selling it, which isn't such a bad thing when you look at how sparse the offerings have been in the past couple of years. But if you ask Nintendo, naw, the system is doing fine! Look at the titles that have come out, like Donkey Kong Country Returns and Skyward Sword…! It's true, but even so, most people feel as if their Wii is largely a glorified paperweight.
So how do we know that won't just happen again next gen? Kotaku's Jason Schreier asked the hard questions in a recent interview with Nintendo of America's president, Reggie Fils-Aime. On the subject, Reggie said:
But again, you could go back and have the same conversation looking at the original PlayStation. You could have the same conversation looking at PlayStation 2. You could have the same conversation looking at the original Xbox. The fact of the matter is if you look at the generation before this one, you look at GameCube, you look at PS2, you look at the original Xbox. From a performance standpoint, GameCube was, if not #1, certainly #2 from an overall performance standpoint. #3 was PS2. So performance has absolutely nothing to do with longevity and support.
While it's his job to speak well of the console regardless of the circumstances, he's got a point, yeah? Power kind of has nothing to do with how well a system is supported…but it doesn't hurt, either. If the Wii can't really run the games developers are creating in the future, and third party tends to do poorly on the system, is there really much of an assurance we'll see support beyond the occasional big first party title? I'm not so sure, though Nintendo is is adamant that things will be different.
