Now, I'm by no means a video game journalist, but Julius Tarng's post got me thinking a bit about Nintendo's new console and the future of gaming.

Let me start out by saying that if Nintendo can pull this off, I will be surprised. Nintendo alone has pretty openly stated that their competitor is no longer Sony or Microsoft, but Apple. Apple came out of nowhere and took not just the gaming industry, but the casual gaming industry by storm, arguably Nintendo's core market. They have every reason to be afraid. If you understand this and take one look at the Wii U, you begin to understand where Miyamoto & co. are aiming their guns.

The Wii U, however, is too little too late.

The Looming Threat

There's no denying that Apple's key advantage in every market it ventures into is iTunes. They have 200 million iTunes accounts, each with credit card information, ready to purchase anything Apple decides to sell. There's also the fact that a game on the App Store is often only 99 cents, and rarely price higher than $5. For casual consumers, this is huge. That's why iOS took off as a gaming platform without Apple ever needing to brand it as such. (Apple started acknowledging iOS as a gaming platform 4 years after the first iPhone was released with Game Center.) There's lots of other little things that contribute to Apple's success in a market they never meant to conquer, but that's the main point.

One of the things that Sony and Microsoft have gotten right is building an account system. While one of them seems to be better at holding on to accounts than the other, the main point here is that like Apple, they are building a database of their customer's financial information. Storing this information ultimately allows customers to frictionlessly purchase digital goods, just like on the App Store.

Like Nintendo's online strategy up until this week, any sort of long-term account system is non-existant. Moving from the DS eStore to the 3DS eStore, I've heard that you can move your Club Nintendo account and transfer your purchases, but as far as I know, you have to enter your credit card information for every purchase. That doesn't exactly encourage me as a consumer to buy stuff.

If we give Nintendo the benefit of the doubt now and assume that the Wii U will introduce some sort of sustainable account system that stores credit cards for downloadable purchases, they're still a generation too late. Keep in mind that it was over ten years ago that Apple launched iTunes and began harvesting the information that makes them so powerful today. Game Center on iOS is the most popular online gaming service in the world. Around the same time, Microsoft launched Xbox Live on the original Xbox. Xbox Live is probably the most successful online gaming service ever. See the trend here?

A Weakening Industry

Now let's take a look at the gaming industry as a whole. I've been out of the gaming world for a while, but as far as I can tell, the time of 3rd-party exclusives is long gone. Long live timed exclusivity.

Revenues from boxed video games are way down, and they aren't getting any better. Most of the titles that big 3rd-party studios like Electronic Arts crank out are multiplatform on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, and the closest we get to a "console exclusive" is a costume, or an item, or if we're lucky a whole character.

It's safe to say that the gaming industry is an industry where the well of creativity is almost dry—we don't get games like LittleBigPlanet every day. Instead, everything is just another Halo, Gears of War, or Modern Warfare rehash. To the 3rd-parties, there's not enough money in making things that are new.

Nintendo, however, is a company that thrives on innovation. The industry has always looked to them to determine what the next trend in gaming will be. The Wii U is nothing if not innovative. At the same time, its important to remember that innovation is expensive. Unless Nintendo is really going to throw it's back behind 3rd-parties, we're just going to see the same games on PS3 and 360 ported to Wii U, completing the trifecta.

I believe that the reason why the Wii became so unprofitable so quickly was because once the novelty wore off, it wasn't really a contender for ports. No one wanted to make games exclusively for Wii anymore and it wasn't powerful enough to port the latest and greatest without much work. Wii U changes that, but it doesn't change the fact that the novelty will, eventually, wear off.

Having a Plan

It's important that Nintendo has a plan, and a damn good one. Apple has the casual gamers, but it feels like they're lying to themselves when they say that the Wii U is their answer to "hardcore" gamers. It's a cool idea, and it's a different idea, but it's not what a hardcore gamer wants.

I'll be the first to admit that I could be wrong. Wii U could sell like hotcakes and take the next generation. I don't know. Keep in mind, though, that the last time an industry leader launched their next-gen console before everyone else, that industry leader dropped out of the hardware race and became a shell of its former self. (Ironically enough, that console also had a screen on the controller.) I'm not saying that this spells the end of Nintendo and that Zelda will be a launch title on the Playstation 4, but I don't think we'll be hearing about how the Wii U prints money. The 3DS surely doesn't.

Ultimately, I'm hard pressed to believe that with the Wii U anything will change—at least not in the way Nintendo is hoping. Nintendo will and always will be the best at making games for its consoles—by a large margin, at that—and so, history repeats itself in that way that only it can.

Clarification: The Xbox 360 launched first this generation and has done well, to say the least. It's important to note though that it leverages Xbox Live, which had an existing install base from the Xbox. Wii U is more like the Dreamcast in that there is no online service to rope existing customers in.