The Nintendo Revolution (now known as the Wii, the gayest name of all consoles, evar!) will be sold at a profit, and I'm happy about it. It's not because I'm some Nintendo nutcase that worships at the altar of Nintendo (although I'm considering
this shirt), I'm happy because this hopefully opens the door for homebrew game designers everywhere. While this is not a sure-fire truth, it's a hope that I think many of us hold, and I'm guessing we'll win Nintendo around.
See, developey people want to see the ps3 sold at a (hopefully heavy) loss so that we can buy a couple, put something like a raytracer on it, and try to render our rendition of the next Toy Story. It's a bargain priced supercomputer. People want the Wii to be sold at a profit because we want nice dev-kits and open-ended controllers. The DS was initially dubbed the "Developer's System" because it was supposedly built for developers, and Nintendo was apparently doing "stuff" to help "independent game makers". While the third party
NDS adapters are by far the easiest way of getting started, I'm hoping that Nintendo will soon be opening up more... legal... avenues to allow people to make games for the DS.
The signs for the Revolution are positive, and the fact that it's region free and will allow downloads of previous Nintendo games off the web are just some of the things that lead me to believe that Nintendo really are trying to open up to independent, and perhaps even open source, game makers. I'd love for a bunch of free software "killer apps" to appear on the "Wii". I think when Nintendo sees exactly how having an open platform can make the Wii a platform for the "intelligent box near the TV", I think they'll really start taking steps to open up both the Wii and the DS.
I'm just confused about what I should call the thing...