This scam is now in it's 5th year, and that is the point of the scam. The idea is not win in a final judgement, the point is to keep the scam alive. As long as these cases continue: scox, msft, and bsf, keep winning.
This isn't precisely the case. My guess is that if MSFT and SCOX could make this just silently disappear and be forgotten, they would have awhile back. Having the scam continue was only good when they were winning, and not having IBM drill all their teeth out slowly, meticulously, and of course, painfully. At this point, we want, nay need this to continue and for SCOX to be dragged through the mud in the worst possible and most public manner possible. IBM has turned this entirely around to the benefit of the Linux community.
The scam was yet another smart move by msft. Msft may not be fooling anybody here, but it's the PHBs that matter. The PHBs must believe that Linux is a legal mine-field.
Ah see, but that's no longer the case. What PHB's see now is that anyone going after Linux has the 800-ton gorilla named IBM after them. Yes, Microsoft would love for people to believe that Linux is a legal minefield (witness the recent "235 patents" FUD), but with every case that's lost and every bluff called, the legal position of Linux becomes far clearer. Vague threats and sham lawsuits (as the SCO case originally was) are bad; swift, decisive response is the only defense. Microsoft (and other competitors to a lesser extent) are not going to back down; we have to be ready and have a strategy to fight their tactics.
... Bill Gates is still the richest man in the world, check.... Microsoft is still the dominate OS, check.... Microsoft revenue increases every year, check.
...Microsoft is still the follower, not the innovator, check.
This simply provides some insight as to why. Microsoft fanboys need not apply.
I believe adding another 10 MB to their 10 MB max attachement size would make a lot of users happy.
However this would make a lot more users unhappy. 10MB is already ridiculous for attachments... sending over 100k is just bad netiquette. Mail servers (and often clients) don't handle large content well, and that's not their purpose. It's even worse than sending HTML messages. Increasing this would just encourage the idiots.
Besides, what's the point? If you want to share photos, Google provides Picasa and Picasa Web. Video; YouTube and Google Video (do you really need links?). There's even Google Pages, letting you upload 100MB of random stuff.
What? Talk about naive. Zelda has NEVER been an RPG and has ALWAYS been an action adventure.
Apparently you never played Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link, which, despite the ironic name, is the only game in the series to be an RPG, featuring experience and levelling. Given that it's that early in the series though, that's definite precedent. Of course, it was still an action/RPG, so no menu battles please.:)
Ever notice how those that have religion are very weak about their belief in it? It's as if a word spoken against it so threatens them that they must defend it vocally and almost violently.
Ever notice how criminals that get caught do something stupid? It's as if being a criminal somehow makes you stupid, or perhaps only stupid people are criminals.
No, wait. This excludes all the ones that don't get caught, which you don't know about. Similarly, your observation implicitly excludes all the folks who are of a religion and yet don't "vocally and almost violently" defend it, because you have no metric.
This is simple logic. The one does not generalize to the all. The vocal minority does not represent the silent majority. They might be annoying, though.
Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 have a relatively specific audience and a fairly specific appeal, frankly, based on one feature, which are the graphics itself. And the rest of product is actually not a great product--no disrespect, but...the games and gameplay on it aren't very strong.
I won't speak to the XBOX 360. The XBOX sold on "we have better graphics!" and "pay us to play online!", so I'm not going to argue. But the PS1 and the PS2 sold exclusively on the sheer library of great games they had, and the PS3 is selling on the promise of the same. If there wasn't a huge queue of games coming down the pike, I wouldn't have bought one. Sure, some of them you can also get for the 360. But all of them you can get for the PS3.
Additionally, people seem to think the "power" of the PS3 is about how many polygons it can push. This is not true: it's about putting thousands of gameplay objects into the world and providing something hugely more deep and interactive.
Yes, the Wii architecture is fundamentally the same as the Gamecube architecture, but so what?
So I'm paying $250 for a minor bump in speed, a shiny new box, and a new controller. And it won't even push 720p. When I pay $250 for a new graphics card, I expect it to push more than 640x480.
The article shows why so many dislike the Wii. [...]
The games aren't selling the console [...]
When I buy a console its a game/games thats sold the console to me [...]
With the Wii people are buying it because its cheap and you get to wave your hand around.
This is precisely why I don't like the Wii. Hell if Nintendo sold me a new 8-bit NES 2 for $50 with a ton of new games, I'd buy it. But waving my hand around in the air has little but gimmick appeal. Sadly, I have to disagree with "so many dislike the Wii"... I only wish more people disliked it for these reasons. My guess is Nintendo is banking on the following: quick to market, cheap to produce, huge gimmick to move consoles, and then the games come later. And basically backstab the Gamecube and loot its corpse of the final two big titles to give the Wii something worth playing to start with. This might work brilliantly, too: it seems to have been working so far. The whole plan will backfire, however, if Nintendo can't come up with more than 3-4 big titles a year, among other things. When the wiimote fad passes and the hype can't carry it, if there's nothing left, expect the console to get dumped by the millions.
If I was Sony I'd make my own Wiimote, package a few first party games (something similar to Wiisports) and kill off the buzz its created. I'd have it run on Bluetooth (with a bluetooth adapater for the PS2) sell it at a dirt cheap rate (say £40 with SonySports.) I'd have flung alot of recources at the issue and had a PS2/Sonymote out before the end of the year and packaged for £140. Then again I'm not a sony executive, at best you've just stillborned the Wii and at worst you've eaten a little into Nintendo's new market.
Or all the fanboys would whine that Sony is copying Nintendo again. Think SIXAXIS: if Sony didn't incorporate motion tech, everyone would claim Nintendo has the advantage; if they did, everyone would claim they copied it. It's a no-win situation, but the latter leaves you on par with your competitor.
Honestly, from the perspective of a gamer, Sony has been doing things right. They're still focused on providing a solid platform with everything the development studios need to create any game they envision. Not just some subset of game that corresponds to one person's definition of "fun". Need the HDD? Need delivery capacity? Need more processing power to make those physics work and provide a more interactive world? Need motion control? Need analog sticks? It's all there; use it, or don't use it. It's not "build all your games around this interaction model". The price point is the one killer, but that will change eventually.
Remember, a more immersive game makes the interaction layer as thin as possible; it does not focus on it. Some would say this is the goal of the wiimote. It is not. The goal of the wiimote is to sell the Wii. If it were not, we'd be seeing more screenshots and videos of games in ads, not people swinging their arms around.
Or perhaps an even simpler bet, that not enough people will have HD tv screens to notice the higher res graphics of the PS3/360? After all, unless your tv is HD ready you won't see much improvement anyway.
This is actually not true. I played the PS3 on SD for a month or so; yes, it dies for HD, but yes, it's also far better than the last generation. Some games actually look better in SD: MotorStorm (at least the demo), is a good example.
Purely graphical considerations aside. The power of the PS3 is not all about graphics: it's more about vastly more parallel processing power. Physics, more stuff on the screen, deeper interaction, bigger worlds, etc. That's stuff you will appreciate regardless of resolution.
So if you file a DMCA complaint about a fake ID, you would be screwed one way or the other - either you created (or paid someone else to create) the ID, or you committed perjury when filing the DMCA request.
I'm not a lawyer, but if someone posts an image of your likeness without your permission, I think you can make them take it down under a number of laws. This would mean you're not claiming anything about the fake ID, just the photo.
The only thing I can hope is that with all the self-doomsday predictions by the media industry about how they're going to go bust is that they suddenly actually do. That would be funny.
Listening to the same MP3s that way had the CPU going at around 5-10%.
You're telling me that under Vista, it takes 5-10% of the CPU to listen to an MP3? With Aero off? On a 2GHz Athlon64? Right now I've got XMMS playing a high-bitrate MP3 stream with the mini-visualizer on, and I'm running Beryl with the effects turned up... compositing and all that junk on. And it's taking about 3% CPU. And I think that's obscene, because playing MP3s has taken just about 0% CPU for years.
Making poor imitations of crappy ideas isn't clear indication of talent; quite the opposite, in fact.
Well, because I believe that Siverlight will become an important component in future applications. The majority of people will probably be happy to spice up their web applications with a little silverlight as it will run on Windows and MacOS.
You forgot "want" before "believe", and we all know the result of introducing yet another nonstandard web extension is. I mean, it's worked so well for Microsoft in the past: proprietary JavaScript extensions, HTML extensions, ActiveX. It's just brought the web together into a nice, unified platform, so you never have to worry about how every different browser handles your website. Oh wait, no it hasn't: just the opposite.
But if there is no Silverlight for Linux, we will be prevented from getting access to content and applications that will be available.
So we got a couple of strategies dealing with this:
How about: d) Proactively discourage its use; build, distribute, and support and alternative framework that is not under the control of a corporation known for breaking compatibility regularly to discourage competition. Get this into Firefox and build an IE plugin to support it.
In fact, you can ignore Mono completely, nobody is forcing you to use it
[...]
I loved the Silverlight announcement, it is a way of bringing my favorite platform to the web (the CLR and now the DLR) and it seems like a natural fit and extension to what Mono does.
[...]
And why exactly would I care about your pet project?
I think you just asked the question that so many others are asking about Mono.
You say this sarcastically, but this is what Microsoft really means when they say "cross-platform": it runs on all Windows platforms. (Vista, XP, Mobile, XBOX, etc.) I'm not joking. There should be (+1, Sad, Sad World) moderation.
If you are going to pay six hundred dollars for a game console, you are probably willing to buy eighty dollar games. If you want cheap games, why not stick with your PS2 and buy some used games for $15 to $20 each. The Wii is being sold as the cheap alternative, so cheap downloadables make a lot of sense.
I am willing to pay $80 for a game if it's worth paying $80 for. It doesn't matter what platform it's for. Guitar Hero II (with guitar controller) goes for $80 on the PS2 ($90 on the 360), and I don't see anyone complaining about that. Why? Because it's worth the $80.
Off-the-shelf PS3 games are $49-$59, not $79. But $10 more than "last-gen" games isn't a whole lot more (certainly not the $30 you're claiming), especially since there aren't a whole lot of games at the moment, anyway. And before you go "ha ha! not a lot of games!" this applies to every console. At least on the PS3, there's been about a game a month.
The PS3 also has a decent list of cheap, solid downloadables; even some of the demos have a lot to do:
Various minor game incremental content (free to $1.99 for some level packs)
There is also Lemmings ($4.99) and some other things I haven't tried. There are some demos and games that suck (Blast Factor). But the only game on this list I found a bit high was flOw; it's cool, but it's essentially an interactive screen saver. Gripshift was the best $10 I've spent on a game in awhile. Tons of levels with tons of things to do. Tekken is "a lot", at least compared to other things on the list, but come on, $20 for a top arcade fighting game that's $40 in the store? You're complaining? I'm not.
In short, if a game costs a lot, and it's worth it, then no, there's no problem getting it.
(Apparently people don't remember the much less uniform pricing structure of games back in the NES/SMS days. Super Mario Bros 2 went for $120 at Toys'R'Us.)
This is irrelevant. The poster was looking for a hobbiest solution for Cell, not a mass-market platform. Yes, you can get a contract for 100k XScale boards for a good rate: this is why people use them. 50 $400 devkits aren't a big expense for such an endeavor, either.
But for a hobbiest developer looking for a cheap way to hack around on the platform, $500-$600 for a Cell system is dirt cheap, even compared to the lowest-end devkits for embedded systems, as shown.
Anyone know of a cheaper way to get into Cell, besides Playstation?
You think someone's going to release a Cell board for under $500 (or even $600)? Heck, embedded dev/"hobbiest" boards for stuff like ColdFire are $200 and ARM are $399+ (most places don't even have quotes on the site), and those are cheap, low-end systems.
Once Granddad has been sold on Tennis and Baseball, he will buy other games. Nintendo has opened up a whole new market segment.
This is the fallacy, or at least the unproven assumption. Whether they can or will do this remains to be seen. Get some non-gamers to try it out because it's a crazy fad? Sure. Make a sustainable market by converting non-gamers to gamers? Indeterminate.
Nobody really knows how they will act and buy
Precisely.
but marketing studies realized 20 years ago just how much crap you can sell to older people, for example, if you just know how to do it.
So you're saying the Wii is crap and Nintendo is selling snake oil to elderly folk?
I've heard that before in this discussion. I still can't wrap my head around it. Do you guys really think 300-400 is in the "impulse buy" category? It's not an impulse buy, it's an "that's a good value, these other consoles are too damn expensive for a damn gaming system" buy.
Anything around $300 fits in the "toy" budget range. If you're a 20s-30s gamer with a decent job, this is an impulse buy. This is what the generation that grew up with Nintendo and Sega fall under. "These other consoles" are not "too much" by any stretch. If you're spending $1000-$2000 on an HDTV, and you buy a good number of games, $500 for a console isn't that much.
You say that as if is something negative. Newsflash: Party games are what the target market is looking for. I've owned a Wii since launch day. Do you want to know what the people coming over now and then for a game are requesting to play? Wii Sports (Tennis or Bowling, mostly) and Rayman. Putting down those party games means misunderstanding why the Wii is a success.
It is something negative. These sorts of things are faddish. A year from now, the only people who are going to care about Wii Sports are those who have never played it, because they're not gamers and they would otherwise not care. Despite what Nintendo says, the bread and butter of their business is still the gamer who is going to buy their games... not buy a Wii, play Wii sports a few times a year, and otherwise let it gather dust. These are not the people who play Zelda and Mario and Metroid.
It's very simple: Nintendo built something that people actually want.
Correction: Nintendo built something and convinced people they really wanted it, and that other people really wanted it. Then they made it cheap enough that it was an impulse buy.
This strategy pays off in the short term; good hype and low price lead to a lot of people buying something just to check it out. However, it remains to be seen whether Nintendo can provide a sustained game library and actually make games that live up to the hype. So far, nothing has.
And that's the hard part: Coding is the easy part of game design. Making a good game is the hard part. Always has been.
Nintendo is still faced with the problem of making a game. The top Wii titles right now are Zelda and Super Paper Mario. Both of these have come after years of development and they have gutted and abandoned the GameCube to get them. Everything else is a party game. The going-forward list is pretty shabby as well; not too many big titles besides Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3, both of which are still "TBA 2007". Ports of RE4 and NiGHTS. This is the same problem Nintendo has had for the previous two generations: a few stellar games, and little else. This isn't enough for a #1 console.
Maybe that's why so many PC and Xbox and PS3 titles try to sell on their graphics alone.
Many PC games sell mostly on graphics, these days: Doom 3, I'm looking at you; many don't, and I'm talking about all the deep strategy and simulation games available. 360 games might sell on graphics, but games such as Oblivion also don't; I didn't pay a lot of attention to the console, though most cross-platform games of the previous generation "looked best" on the XBOX. PlayStation games have typically not sold primarily on graphics (despite having some gorgeous-looking games); when people talk about the power of the PS3, they're talking about the ability to have thousands of live objects in gameplay, as opposed to the mere tens the previous generation managed. Sure, all of these platforms can have great graphics, too. Great graphics and great gameplay are not mutually exclusive; there are many counterexamples here. Poor graphics do not equate with great gameplay. Poor graphics can detract from gameplay just as much as too much focus on graphics can result in shallow gameplay.
What really matters here for all consoles is the same thing that has always mattered: who has the biggest library of solid games. Nintendo has not delivered this for over a decade. Microsoft has never delivered this. Sony has been delivering, but they need to show they're able to keep it up. There are other factors, but in the end, the library wins.
People have been buying the Wii because there's been a lot of hype. However, a lot of people I've talked to put down their Wii after Zelda or Wii Sports and it's collected dust for months. Unless Nintendo starts delivering a lot of deep, solid games regularly, people will lose interest, and that stock will start piling up in the storerooms far sooner than 2009.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't precisely the case. My guess is that if MSFT and SCOX could make this just silently disappear and be forgotten, they would have awhile back. Having the scam continue was only good when they were winning, and not having IBM drill all their teeth out slowly, meticulously, and of course, painfully. At this point, we want, nay need this to continue and for SCOX to be dragged through the mud in the worst possible and most public manner possible. IBM has turned this entirely around to the benefit of the Linux community.
Ah see, but that's no longer the case. What PHB's see now is that anyone going after Linux has the 800-ton gorilla named IBM after them. Yes, Microsoft would love for people to believe that Linux is a legal minefield (witness the recent "235 patents" FUD), but with every case that's lost and every bluff called, the legal position of Linux becomes far clearer. Vague threats and sham lawsuits (as the SCO case originally was) are bad; swift, decisive response is the only defense. Microsoft (and other competitors to a lesser extent) are not going to back down; we have to be ready and have a strategy to fight their tactics.
...Microsoft is still the follower, not the innovator, check.
This simply provides some insight as to why. Microsoft fanboys need not apply.
However this would make a lot more users unhappy. 10MB is already ridiculous for attachments... sending over 100k is just bad netiquette. Mail servers (and often clients) don't handle large content well, and that's not their purpose. It's even worse than sending HTML messages. Increasing this would just encourage the idiots.
Besides, what's the point? If you want to share photos, Google provides Picasa and Picasa Web. Video; YouTube and Google Video (do you really need links?). There's even Google Pages, letting you upload 100MB of random stuff.
Or MP3s.
Apparently you never played Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link, which, despite the ironic name, is the only game in the series to be an RPG, featuring experience and levelling. Given that it's that early in the series though, that's definite precedent. Of course, it was still an action/RPG, so no menu battles please. :)
Not unless the parent poster knows you.
Ever notice how criminals that get caught do something stupid? It's as if being a criminal somehow makes you stupid, or perhaps only stupid people are criminals.
No, wait. This excludes all the ones that don't get caught, which you don't know about. Similarly, your observation implicitly excludes all the folks who are of a religion and yet don't "vocally and almost violently" defend it, because you have no metric.
This is simple logic. The one does not generalize to the all. The vocal minority does not represent the silent majority. They might be annoying, though.
I won't speak to the XBOX 360. The XBOX sold on "we have better graphics!" and "pay us to play online!", so I'm not going to argue. But the PS1 and the PS2 sold exclusively on the sheer library of great games they had, and the PS3 is selling on the promise of the same. If there wasn't a huge queue of games coming down the pike, I wouldn't have bought one. Sure, some of them you can also get for the 360. But all of them you can get for the PS3.
Additionally, people seem to think the "power" of the PS3 is about how many polygons it can push. This is not true: it's about putting thousands of gameplay objects into the world and providing something hugely more deep and interactive.
So I'm paying $250 for a minor bump in speed, a shiny new box, and a new controller. And it won't even push 720p. When I pay $250 for a new graphics card, I expect it to push more than 640x480.
This is precisely why I don't like the Wii. Hell if Nintendo sold me a new 8-bit NES 2 for $50 with a ton of new games, I'd buy it. But waving my hand around in the air has little but gimmick appeal. Sadly, I have to disagree with "so many dislike the Wii"... I only wish more people disliked it for these reasons. My guess is Nintendo is banking on the following: quick to market, cheap to produce, huge gimmick to move consoles, and then the games come later. And basically backstab the Gamecube and loot its corpse of the final two big titles to give the Wii something worth playing to start with. This might work brilliantly, too: it seems to have been working so far. The whole plan will backfire, however, if Nintendo can't come up with more than 3-4 big titles a year, among other things. When the wiimote fad passes and the hype can't carry it, if there's nothing left, expect the console to get dumped by the millions.
Or all the fanboys would whine that Sony is copying Nintendo again. Think SIXAXIS: if Sony didn't incorporate motion tech, everyone would claim Nintendo has the advantage; if they did, everyone would claim they copied it. It's a no-win situation, but the latter leaves you on par with your competitor.
Honestly, from the perspective of a gamer, Sony has been doing things right. They're still focused on providing a solid platform with everything the development studios need to create any game they envision. Not just some subset of game that corresponds to one person's definition of "fun". Need the HDD? Need delivery capacity? Need more processing power to make those physics work and provide a more interactive world? Need motion control? Need analog sticks? It's all there; use it, or don't use it. It's not "build all your games around this interaction model". The price point is the one killer, but that will change eventually.
Remember, a more immersive game makes the interaction layer as thin as possible; it does not focus on it. Some would say this is the goal of the wiimote. It is not. The goal of the wiimote is to sell the Wii. If it were not, we'd be seeing more screenshots and videos of games in ads, not people swinging their arms around.
This is actually not true. I played the PS3 on SD for a month or so; yes, it dies for HD, but yes, it's also far better than the last generation. Some games actually look better in SD: MotorStorm (at least the demo), is a good example.
Purely graphical considerations aside. The power of the PS3 is not all about graphics: it's more about vastly more parallel processing power. Physics, more stuff on the screen, deeper interaction, bigger worlds, etc. That's stuff you will appreciate regardless of resolution.
I'm not a lawyer, but if someone posts an image of your likeness without your permission, I think you can make them take it down under a number of laws. This would mean you're not claiming anything about the fake ID, just the photo.
The only thing I can hope is that with all the self-doomsday predictions by the media industry about how they're going to go bust is that they suddenly actually do. That would be funny.
I bet the infidels are actually committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates, too, eh?
You're telling me that under Vista, it takes 5-10% of the CPU to listen to an MP3? With Aero off? On a 2GHz Athlon64? Right now I've got XMMS playing a high-bitrate MP3 stream with the mini-visualizer on, and I'm running Beryl with the effects turned up... compositing and all that junk on. And it's taking about 3% CPU. And I think that's obscene, because playing MP3s has taken just about 0% CPU for years.
Making poor imitations of crappy ideas isn't clear indication of talent; quite the opposite, in fact.
You forgot "want" before "believe", and we all know the result of introducing yet another nonstandard web extension is. I mean, it's worked so well for Microsoft in the past: proprietary JavaScript extensions, HTML extensions, ActiveX. It's just brought the web together into a nice, unified platform, so you never have to worry about how every different browser handles your website. Oh wait, no it hasn't: just the opposite.
How about: d) Proactively discourage its use; build, distribute, and support and alternative framework that is not under the control of a corporation known for breaking compatibility regularly to discourage competition. Get this into Firefox and build an IE plugin to support it.
I think you just asked the question that so many others are asking about Mono.
I can't help think about the latest ThreePanelSoul after reading all of this. Sadly it seems that the TPS story is also true!
You say this sarcastically, but this is what Microsoft really means when they say "cross-platform": it runs on all Windows platforms. (Vista, XP, Mobile, XBOX, etc.) I'm not joking. There should be (+1, Sad, Sad World) moderation.
I am willing to pay $80 for a game if it's worth paying $80 for. It doesn't matter what platform it's for. Guitar Hero II (with guitar controller) goes for $80 on the PS2 ($90 on the 360), and I don't see anyone complaining about that. Why? Because it's worth the $80.
Off-the-shelf PS3 games are $49-$59, not $79. But $10 more than "last-gen" games isn't a whole lot more (certainly not the $30 you're claiming), especially since there aren't a whole lot of games at the moment, anyway. And before you go "ha ha! not a lot of games!" this applies to every console. At least on the PS3, there's been about a game a month.
The PS3 also has a decent list of cheap, solid downloadables; even some of the demos have a lot to do:
There is also Lemmings ($4.99) and some other things I haven't tried. There are some demos and games that suck (Blast Factor). But the only game on this list I found a bit high was flOw; it's cool, but it's essentially an interactive screen saver. Gripshift was the best $10 I've spent on a game in awhile. Tons of levels with tons of things to do. Tekken is "a lot", at least compared to other things on the list, but come on, $20 for a top arcade fighting game that's $40 in the store? You're complaining? I'm not.
In short, if a game costs a lot, and it's worth it, then no, there's no problem getting it.
(Apparently people don't remember the much less uniform pricing structure of games back in the NES/SMS days. Super Mario Bros 2 went for $120 at Toys'R'Us.)
This is irrelevant. The poster was looking for a hobbiest solution for Cell, not a mass-market platform. Yes, you can get a contract for 100k XScale boards for a good rate: this is why people use them. 50 $400 devkits aren't a big expense for such an endeavor, either.
But for a hobbiest developer looking for a cheap way to hack around on the platform, $500-$600 for a Cell system is dirt cheap, even compared to the lowest-end devkits for embedded systems, as shown.
...and it should be noted that on the blade servers or any embedded board you happen upon, you're not going to have a GPU at all. ;)
How much is a full PS3 devkit anyway? Compared to an IBM mainframe, the PS3 route may be still be cheaper...
You think someone's going to release a Cell board for under $500 (or even $600)? Heck, embedded dev/"hobbiest" boards for stuff like ColdFire are $200 and ARM are $399+ (most places don't even have quotes on the site), and those are cheap, low-end systems.
This is the fallacy, or at least the unproven assumption. Whether they can or will do this remains to be seen. Get some non-gamers to try it out because it's a crazy fad? Sure. Make a sustainable market by converting non-gamers to gamers? Indeterminate.
Precisely.
So you're saying the Wii is crap and Nintendo is selling snake oil to elderly folk?
Anything around $300 fits in the "toy" budget range. If you're a 20s-30s gamer with a decent job, this is an impulse buy. This is what the generation that grew up with Nintendo and Sega fall under. "These other consoles" are not "too much" by any stretch. If you're spending $1000-$2000 on an HDTV, and you buy a good number of games, $500 for a console isn't that much.
It is something negative. These sorts of things are faddish. A year from now, the only people who are going to care about Wii Sports are those who have never played it, because they're not gamers and they would otherwise not care. Despite what Nintendo says, the bread and butter of their business is still the gamer who is going to buy their games... not buy a Wii, play Wii sports a few times a year, and otherwise let it gather dust. These are not the people who play Zelda and Mario and Metroid.
Correction: Nintendo built something and convinced people they really wanted it, and that other people really wanted it. Then they made it cheap enough that it was an impulse buy.
This strategy pays off in the short term; good hype and low price lead to a lot of people buying something just to check it out. However, it remains to be seen whether Nintendo can provide a sustained game library and actually make games that live up to the hype. So far, nothing has.
Nintendo is still faced with the problem of making a game. The top Wii titles right now are Zelda and Super Paper Mario. Both of these have come after years of development and they have gutted and abandoned the GameCube to get them. Everything else is a party game. The going-forward list is pretty shabby as well; not too many big titles besides Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3, both of which are still "TBA 2007". Ports of RE4 and NiGHTS. This is the same problem Nintendo has had for the previous two generations: a few stellar games, and little else. This isn't enough for a #1 console.
Many PC games sell mostly on graphics, these days: Doom 3, I'm looking at you; many don't, and I'm talking about all the deep strategy and simulation games available. 360 games might sell on graphics, but games such as Oblivion also don't; I didn't pay a lot of attention to the console, though most cross-platform games of the previous generation "looked best" on the XBOX. PlayStation games have typically not sold primarily on graphics (despite having some gorgeous-looking games); when people talk about the power of the PS3, they're talking about the ability to have thousands of live objects in gameplay, as opposed to the mere tens the previous generation managed. Sure, all of these platforms can have great graphics, too. Great graphics and great gameplay are not mutually exclusive; there are many counterexamples here. Poor graphics do not equate with great gameplay. Poor graphics can detract from gameplay just as much as too much focus on graphics can result in shallow gameplay.
What really matters here for all consoles is the same thing that has always mattered: who has the biggest library of solid games. Nintendo has not delivered this for over a decade. Microsoft has never delivered this. Sony has been delivering, but they need to show they're able to keep it up. There are other factors, but in the end, the library wins.
People have been buying the Wii because there's been a lot of hype. However, a lot of people I've talked to put down their Wii after Zelda or Wii Sports and it's collected dust for months. Unless Nintendo starts delivering a lot of deep, solid games regularly, people will lose interest, and that stock will start piling up in the storerooms far sooner than 2009.