Are Wii Fucked?

Are Wii Fucked?

Article written by Jay on 6/8/09
Last edited on 6/8/09

Gamers sit up and take notice! Do you, as a gamer, want your mom or grandpa to be an audience for game developers? Do you even want to see geriatrics flailing their flabby arms around or doing mock yoga in front of the television? The answer better be no, unless of course you are looking forward to this possible hellish future of console gaming. The runaway success of the Wii is endangering gaming by trying to impart upon it the one thing that has made it ours for so long, mainstream success with non-gaming audiences. Thanks to Nintendo’s powerhouse console, which has consistently topped the sales chart since release, the Wii is in danger of making gaming mainstream and accessible to any and all asshats that would sit down with a controller and believe themselves to be “with it”.

The Wii, as of March, has sold more units than both Microsoft’s and Sony’s current-gen console sales combined. Much of the appeal of the Wii stems from the novel motion-capture system and general lobotomizing of smart game play in favor of ease of use. Case in point, look at Wii Sports, the most widespread and arguably popular (in terms of use) game for the Wii. Any idiot can strap on their Wii controller and have a seizure in front of the screen, Nintendo calls that tennis, but I call that the deaths knell for gaming’s future. In addition to the maddeningly pedestrian nature of the majority of Wii’s games, producing early 90’s arcade style light-gun shooters, is the way Nintendo turns back the clock in terms of system performance. The Wii hardly can match the performance of either an Xbox 360 or a Playstation 3; graphically it is more akin to the previous-gen predecessor Game Cube. Keep in mind though, the Wii really is not meant for us, the critical gamer, but instead for outsiders. This lack of progress is only compensated by allowing people to create Wii avatars that can then “interact” with other avatars, fucking great idea Nintendo.

With all these strikes against it, the Wii should have crashed and burned a long time ago. However, The Wii has succeeded only because it has been embraced by non-gamers and this success has been fan-fucking-nominal. Nintendo marketed the console at a price far below its competitors, which allowed non-gamers to justify their purchase more readily. Even in the current harsh economic climate, with prices between all three consoles far more competitive, the Wii has been able to trounce both Microsoft and Sony while at the same time reaping profits for Nintendo. Both aforementioned companies, sucker punched by the Wii, have taken notice. This is the crux of my argument. At the end of the day, both Microsoft and Sony are companies that depend upon our money to crank out the next-gen of console gaming. If the Wii continues to expand among non-gamers and those non-gamers continue to snatch up Wii’s to make little fucking avatars, Sony and Microsoft will react. Following the lead of both Microsoft and Sony, game developers will begin to tailor their products to suit an emerging market of non-gamers, a future market where gimmicks and quirks sell over smart design and intelligent gameplay. This prospect is already being glimpsed with the recent changes to the Xbox 360’s Dashboard and its inclusion of startlingly Wii-like avatars.

I do not consider myself an alarmist or prone to be overly dramatic, but I am supremely fucking serious when I say that the Wii may destroy gaming as we know it. The Wii has already destroyed both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 in sales; the two combined just barely meet the growing sales figures of that damned white box. It really is only a matter of time before we see a shift in the gaming market away from us, the heart and soul of the gaming industry, and towards the post-menopausal crowd. As a gamer, I worry about the future and can only do my best to forestall the coming future, picture as me as a John Conner for gamers, only far less heroic and nowhere near as clever.