Hardcore gamers. To me a hardcore gamers is one that has devoted most of his or her free time and possibly life to the art of playing video games, they are ones who will play games made by their favorite developers, not based on whether they are good or not, but just because they believe in the developer, or aren't afraid to take chances. Two of the games that I am referring to are Psychonauts and Beyond Good And Evil, these games were two of the best games published by Majesco and Ubisoft respectively, yet they didn't sell all that well.

On November 19th, 2006 the Nintendo Wii was released. This date will go down as probably the one date in the history of video games that can directly be pointed to as the day that hardcore gamers were led on a path to obscurity, to being a niche, to being ridiculed. This was a day that game makers realized that the Wii was drawing people who had never thought about playing games, let alone buying a system in which to play them on, to it. This day and the next few months showed developers and publishers that if they made a game that used to Wii-mote and nun chuck in a way that would appear to be somewhat exercising, that they would sell like hotcakes. This was a day and subsequent months that developers saw that if they wanted to make a load of money they need to stop worrying about games that only a set group will play and start making a game that they can market to the people that have bought the Wii under the false guise that it will help you loose weight and make you healthier, which by the way, in my opinion, is total BS, they make a game in which you flail your arms up and down people will run to get it so that they can say they are exercising and so that they can feel good about themselves. Well it worked, and so in a few years we can look to Nintendo, the company that brought in so many gamers and then subsequently made them hardcore gamers, as the company that destroys them.

It will get to a point where the Xbox 360 and PS3, and later Microsoft and Sony game systems, will be afterthoughts in making games and pitching them. They will go the way of the PC only a niche group of people play them. They will get crappy ports of even crappier games, jsut so developers will be able to look the gamers in the eye and tell them they made games for their systems. It will get to a point, and has to a certain level, where companies will not want to be any more innovative than they already have because they don't need to. And then there will be a point that the Wii starts to become a fad and people will start to stop playing it, they will stop buying games, and the companies that have hitched their wagons to the Wii will be screwed and will probably go bankrupt and will look to the hardcore gamers, or whats left of us because they(the companies) have drove them to pick up other activities and hobbies, to bail them out and there just will not be enough of us to bail them out and they will go under. The only company that will make any money will be Nintendo and they are the only ones that will profit from the Wii. Companies will have short term success and long term despair.

That is just my opinion of what is going to happen, although I dearly hope that it doesn't. And before Y'all say that I hate Nintendo and the Wii, just know that I have a Wii, a gameboy advance, a gameboy, a 64, an SNES, and a NES, and love them all along with a Xbox 360.