Nintendo will win the next gaming console race. It may take a while after the all three consoles have been launched, but it will happen. The reason why Nintendo will win stems from where the three console makers have come from and their vision of the future of gaming. Nintendo is and always has been a gaming company starting off with the NES and the GameBoy. Games and gaming is their core, it’s what they are all about. On the other hand, Sony and Microsoft are both companies that started off in technological fields (hardware and software) and then added gaming to its core. That is the fundamental difference between the three. That’s why both Microsoft and Sony spend so much time worrying about the hardware and the polygon-processing numbers that their respective machines can crunch out while Nintendo only worries about whether or not the hardware can allow them to create the games they envisioned in their minds.

Microsoft and Sony both come at the game industry with technology in the front of their minds. Issues like which high-definition format should our machine support, what kind of online connectivity it should have, how big should the hard drive be. Those are all technical questions that have very little if anything to do with the essence of a video game. Nintendo could care less about their next system playing DVD’s, having the fastest GPU, or having USB ports. All they care about is whether or not their little box has enough juice to run great looking games that are fun to play.

So why is Nintendo in last place with their Game Cube if they are so great at making games? The answer is simply because the gamers that grew up with NES and SNES aren’t young anymore. Mario, Link, Yoshi, Toad, those icons are the first thing gamers think of when they think of Nintendo and quite frankly they are a little too kiddish to be cool anymore. They (myself included) have greater interest in more mature games and Microsoft and Sony both stole Nintendo’s first generation audience away from them. Nintendo failed to recognize this and is why they have taken quite a hit. But Nintendo has learned from their mistakes and this leads me up to my main argument as to why Nintendo will succeed with the Revolution.