Wii System Menu 4.0

Many commentators in the Gaming world have suggested that Nintendo are loosing the console battle from in front by not effectively competing with the hugely successful XBox Live and Playstation Network services. The implication is that whilst the Wii has sold in stellar numbers, the next generation of gaming experience belongs in particular to the XBox. Eventually the underpowered and easily dismissed Wii will be supplanted by the technically superior XBox and even the underperforming Sony machine.

However, things could pan out somewhat differently. The point to realise here is that so long as your console is online and capable of receiving updates the gaming experience can be changed at the drop of a hat. The perceived weakness of the Wii in not having an internal hard drive to store games has been effectively wiped out in a single (and cheap) upgrade to the new Wii System Menu 4.0. Now gamers can download games directly to high capacity (up to 32Gb) SD cards. Who needs expensive (and occasionally unreliable) blue-ray and hard drives when you can buy an SD card for pocket money?

The other observation has to be that rarely in the software world does the first iteration of a concept win the race. The Apple Mac user interface was ground breaking, but Windows very nearly obliterated the competition. Wordperfect and Lotus Notes owned the market, but Microsoft Office consigned the innovators to history. In the case of XBox Live, there is very little advantage to an early technical lead when your competitor has more machines sitting in people's rooms. Nintendo has the luxury of a huge user base and plenty of money in the coffers. They can observe what works well and more importantly (*cough* Playstation Home) what doesn't.

It's by no means a given that the Wii will continue to succeed. Third party support is most politely described as patchy, and there is a limit to the number of different input devices you can force people to buy. However, Nintendo has lots of room to experiment and highlights like Mario Kart Wii show that online gaming works just as well on the little white box as on more expensive machines. The perfect combination of online payments and software upgrades puts the Wii on equal footing with any of its competitors when it comes to involving the users, and evolving the experience.

All this can be said whilst ignoring the hyperbole friendly OnLiveconcept (which has led to some hugely optimistic futurology in the blogsphere - deserving of a separate debunking post). If games don't need to run on the box next to your television, even the hardware advantage the other consoles have over the Wii will be gone.

Now who wants to call the race?