Wii: Bright or Bleak Future?

A little over a week ago, I came across a great new website: Game Producer Resource. The latest post describes Juuso's (the author) opinion on the upcoming success for the Wii.

Since I work day in and day out with the Wii, I thought I'd throw out my two cents:

I’m not as confident as you. Sales have been very strong and probably will be in the near future. But sustained growth is going to be tough.

The Xbox 360, my personal pick in the long run, and the PS3 will be better at meeting the hardcore gamer market with exceptional titles, XBLA/PSN capabilities and online gaming. The Nintendo Wii is said to try to be winning hardcore fans but attracting casual gamers as well. The casual games market is thriving, but mostly on hardware that casual gamers already own: like a computer or a cell phone. It will be a hard sell to get people to continue to purchase a $250 piece of equipment to play casual style games and that’s it. (For a far better success story, one can look to the DS.)

This leads me to another problem I see with the Wii: game line-up. Working at a third party publisher who fully intends to support the Wii, we still see it as a second tier platform. Triple A titles are going to the 360/PS3 while the Wii will get ports with tacked on Wii Remote functionality. Lackluster but strong support from third parties is going to be detrimental in the long run. Nintendo is the only company who seems to fully see the potential in their own hardware. And with a release schedule of only three or four high profile titles a year, the road ahead looks far less bright.