This has been an obvious question right from the beginning, but C&VG has finally tackled it: Is the novelty of Wii wearing off?
It was an exciting launch for sure, but one that Wii critics have claimed is a temporary phase. Opposition to the controller's motion-control concept cite it as a gimmick whose appeal would soon diminish. Are we already seeing this happen in Japan?
Part of the problem is that not all games use the controller well. According to C&VG: "Red Steel is twitchy and occassionaly (sic) clumsy, Need For Speed: Most Wanted is near unplayable, Far Cry got it all wrong, and the motion control in Marvel: Ultimate Alliance just feels tacked on."
Another part is shortage of new games, partly because "third party developers, CVG has been told on different occasions, didn't receive proper Wii development kits too long before the console's release. With the average game taking well over a year to make these days, we should see an influx of third-party releases -- developed specifically on Wii dev kits (not GameCube placeholders) -- rushing to Wii later this year and in 2008."
There are at least two problems here. The first is that a lot of third party developers depend on Sony and Microsoft consoles for the vast majority of their income. It's very hard to compete with Nintendo on a Nintendo machine: would you really want to go up against Mario, Zelda etc? The second is that the GameCube did badly, so most developers would tend to assume that the Revolution/Wii was most likely to come third in the next-gen race.
Times have changed. The Wii did much better than expected, on its launch, and the PlayStation 3 did worse than expected. Software houses are now busy moving resources away from the PS3 (where they can base games on what they did for the Xbox 360) and to the Wii. EA not only did this, it also went out and bought another developer (Headgate Studios Bought by EA, Focuses on Wii).
It probably upset his bosses, but a week ago, Electronic Arts game developer Andrew Garrett posted something that confirmed this line of thinking. According to Kotaku, it went like this:
Last year, the prediction was that Sony would win the next-gen war, that the PS3 would be the dominant console, just like the PS2 was.
That is no longer the case. The extremely strong performance of the Wii, combined with the miserable performance of Sony has revised pretty much everyone's expectations. Right now, most of us here think the 360 will be on top for this generation, with the battle for second place between Sony and Nintendo (and that's a major shock, as we'd nearly written Nintendo off for the non-handheld market.) Most of us still think Sony will beat off Nintendo, simply due to the older graphics on the Wii, but it's not a sure thing.
My opinion -- get the 360 and/or the Wii. Skip the PS3 unless there's a big change in the near future.
Meanwhile, my advice is to buy whichever machine you really want most, when you can get hold of it at a price you can afford. Life's too short to play fanboy games, and in any case, gaming is now a massive global market where "voting" is very widely distributed.
Also remember that none of the three main systems is going to disappear any time soon, and all three suppliers are going to play again in the next round of the console wars, which will be along pretty soon.
A games console is just for Christmas, it's not for life -- or I'd still be playing Pong.
