I purchased two Xbox bundles over Black Friday and 1 PS3 bundle a week or two earlier. The primary focus of the PS3 is a Blu-Ray/Netflix player. One of the xbox bundles upgrades my current xbox. The (replaced) older xbox goes to my daughter for primarily Netflix viewing and the other new bundle goes to my son for 50/50 Netflix/Gaming. Hopefully this new cable-tv-like viewing on the Xbox systems will be great too.

Nutshell> non-gaming activities were a significant part of the decision making for my purchases.

I wouldn't exactly use Black Friday as the best example of intelligent consumers.

How does that affect the motivations of some buying a item. The Race to fix Smart TVs and cut the cord are on. Apple and other CESC are coming to try to become yout content provider.

Adrenaline doesn't exactly give you the mindset for sound purchases, and Black Friday customers have a lot of it. And Apple trying to become a youth content provider? Pray tell where you saw this alleged development.

Mean't to say you.

And If I recall Apple's whole software is based upon content providing.

This is a good article explaining it.
http://www.slashgear.com/xbox-tv-puts-microsoft-ahead-of-appl...

Yes, yes. Games do sell for consoles. I wouldn't even care if the WiiU was less powerful than the PS360 consoles. As long as it outputs at HD resolution and attracts more 3rd parties than the Wii, then that's all that matters to me. But we are comparing the WiiU to the Xbox 360, so I'm posting in context to what the thread is about.

with the wii U, there is really no excuse for that now. it may end up being less powerful than whatever sony and microsoft put out after that, but i just wish developers wouldn't think like that. that because one system is less graphically powerful than the other, they decide to stop producing games for it. this is one of the problems i have with today's gaming: it's all about how great a game looks, and the graphics when really it is all down to gameplay and the story.

lots of companies have forgot all about what happened during the N.E.S, super nintendo/genesis 16 bit days and they go all out with FPS and fancy graphics.

when nintendo release or promote consoles, graphics have never really been a high priority, rather it is the gameplay and everything else after that.

No, companies don't make games for underpowered consoles, because they need to make the game from scratch. Porting a game from PS3 or Xbox 360 to Wii isn't a matter of just pulling out some textures and polygons - it's a big development project, almost the equivilent of making a new game. And then when they do that, people who have multiple consoles are usually just going to but the HD version, meaning the Wii game doesn't sell that well.

Development decisions have very, very little to do with "oh we can make it prettier" in most cases. It's a decision around where the biggest sales are likely to come from. Why do you think the Call of Duty games are being produced for DS rather than 3DS at the moment, when the 3DS version would be prettier?

As for the Wii U - it's very possible that it will suffer from the same problems that the Wii faced, from the very outset. By the time the Wii U is released, developers will have kits for the PS4/ Xbox 720, and will be working on projects for those consoles. And the Wii U will again be a job to port to.

PS2 says hi. It was the best selling console last gen, and it received much more support than the Xbox and GameCube.

There are many more examples:
Game Boy
Nintendo DS
PlayStation 1
Atari 2600
etc.

Publishers go where the money is at. Wii is an exception cause most developers didn't think it would sell so well, they were completely caught off guard. Usually, the best-selling console gets the most support. If it was all about graphics and power, then the Xbox and GameCube would've had the biggest games and most support, the PSP would have had many more exclusives than the DS, the N64 would have had more support than the PS1, etc.

That's becuase the PS2 wasn't a new brand and didn't use a stupid disc format. Also the gap between those three wasn't as big as the gap between what we have now.

@shingi_70

The PS1 was a new brand that no one thought would do well compared to Nintendo and Sega, yet everyone was proven wrong, and it became the best-selling console at it's time. Also, the PS1 was underpowered compared to the N64.

But it used a better format. While Disc's has crazy long load times what you could do made up for the lack of power.

@shingi_70

The Sega Saturn used CD's also, yet it didn't sell well at all. Why did the Saturn sell worse than the PS1 when they were so similar in power and used the same disc format?

The saturan was rushed out and not received due to the consumer reluctance after the Sega CD and expansion packs were quickly left to die. That was cemented when in was dropped in favor of the dreamcast.

The Playstation also had a lower price point by $100 dollars .

The biggest was bad marketing. They hyped up a september release for it that was supposed to be one week before the PS1. on may 11th SEGA said that was a ruse and console was launching immediately in four retailers nationwide. This caused othe retailers left out angry and pushed Nintendo and sony systems and made ot harder for sony. KB toys one of the biggest Tooy chains at the time decided not to carry any Sega products at all and provide more retail space for the other OEMs.

Yeah, fair enough, good point.

Doesn't change my base point though that 3rd party games on Wii don't usually sell well. No developer is then going to make a 3-console cross platform game and put all the effort into the Wii version, since that would be putting your eggs in the wrong basket.

The reason the Wii gets the "lazy" ports is that the Wii game needs to be built almost from scratch, and is never going to sell over the PS3/ Xbox 360 version to people who own multiple consoles. That doesn't mean the developers themselves necessarily care how "pretty" they can make a game. As you said, they go where the money is.

Third-party companies wouldn't really have to build Wii games from scratch, since the Wii is basically an extension of the GameCube's hardware, which was itself comparable to the PS2. They could just use their PS2 resources to build Wii games, which is what happened a lot of the time in the early days of the Wii.

Unlike the PS2 you couldn't port Elder Scrolls, Dragon Age, Battlefield 3, etc from X360 and PS3 to the Wii. Every game on the Xbox and GC could be ported to PS2. Everyone thinks its all about graphics with the other consoles. Well if you don't have anything new to advertise other than newer online features, a more powerful system, and some little features here and there then obviously graphics are going to get priority, but I have yet to see a game that scored well on metacritics and sold well on really good graphics. When MS and Sony at E3 2010 introduced the Kinect and PSMove showing off a different way to play obviously gameplay got priority.

If Nintendo is going to be the least powerful console next generation it better handle any game that the competitors can put out. Some people do not really care for the fact a that a game gets a multiplatform release, but think of all the games they re-released a generation later using a different control and adding new features. RE4 got re-released using the wiimote controls. Instead of a re-release the Wii-U version can have it the first time around and stick out most in the competition.

I found this very interesting TIME article about the Wii U's supposed specs. He says that people shouldn't be worrying about which game system can display the prettiest graphics or has the most recent tech....

Just read the article and hopefully you'll get his point.

Skyrim has the GOTY award, and you should see PS3/XBoX users's jaws falling to the ground when they see Skyrim running on a high end PC. It is not a matter of HD or not HD, but how many things can you render and how detailed these things may be and how many of these things are effectively iteracting within the game. Even for the same game (Skyrim as an example), it marks the difference between seeing a fully detailed lanscape with a visual horizon of 10Km, or just being able to see what is closer than 100m from you. The difference is terrific, and it has no relation at all with the screen resolution. Just going HD means little and it would not be enough at all (except for HD marios, of course).

3D is going to be on Wii U.Iwata said to The Mercury News that if you a 3DTV which is able to display 3D images,the Wii U will do that,but that's not what they are looking on right now.