"New" usually sells to the uninformed masses. Those with expertise in any genre will view it with the eye of a specialist. They'll buy and play a PS2 or N64 because of either a hipster-like mentality that they have some form of measurable "integrity" for playing a "purist" system, or they're a nostalgia buff that just might prefer old platforms and game styles. Meanwhile, these particular masters are in the minority of the industries profit margin. Who they sale the glut to...the ones that will make up a lot of their short-term revenue...are the plain-jane's and john-doe's of gaming. The tween/teens who get it for Xmas because that's what their friends are getting. The parents that buy it for them because they want their kid to have the current thing. The 40yr old geeks who buy it to play so they can go online and bitch about it (see my HITMAN thread
) pretending they have nothing to do with it. And the normal gamers that want some insta-fun and don't see a problem shelling out $600 bucks every couple of years on the newest thing.
The reason the Wii sold so much instantly is as I suggest in the previous paragraph. The reason it's plateaued to a point is because it's not "new" or "strangely innovative" anymore. The families that were playing it last year have usually moved on to something else. Same thing happened to Guitar Hero and that whole fad. And while Wii's genuine worth as a gaming platform is not in question...and couldn't really be classified as a "fad" per se...it suffers from the same post-fad-symptoms because of its place in the pop culture of gaming. It's a quirky, new way of presenting a game system...eliminating the complex controls for one thing...but because of it's graphic shortcomings in the field of "serious gaming", will tend to fade away if Nintendo doesn't shore up the idea beyond its original "new"-ness.
Does that make sense? I don't feel like I'm explaining it very clearly. Basically what I'm saying is that I think the Wii is a new category: "the unrelenting non-fad".
