ParisLemon

John Biggs on if the Wii U’s touchpad controller will work in the era of smartphones:

I honestly don’t know the answer to this but I can say that the Wii U/GamePad experience is dedicated to gaming just as, say, Kindle Fire is dedicated to reading. There are some distractions in the form of YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu (all unavailable when I wrote this) but the key endeavor here is getting Mario back to Peach’s castle, come hell or high Bowser.

Good line and good thought (though I assume he means the Kindle and not the Kindle Fire). The Kindle has continued to do well and evolve in the age of multi-purpose tablets. Certainly, you can make an argument for a dedicated game console continuing to find the same success.

The issue I see is that all of these consoles are now trying to do everything (YouTube, Hulu, movies, music, etc) and what’s likely to be showcased is that tablets/smartphones do these things better. That just means the gaming experience will have to be that much better on the consoles — especially when you need to continue to convince people to spend $60 on individual games. We’ll see.