Studio head defends Wii’s right to ‘Next-Gen’ tag

Mike Bantick
Tuesday, 21 August 2007 05:06

Your IT - Entertainment

"If it changes the player's view of what interactive entertainment is, to me that's next-gen."  So says Don Daglow of Stormfront Studios.  But really does the Wii have the guts to be next-gen?

At his GCDC speech in Germany yesterday Don Daglow redefined the common view of the term Next-Gen in relation to gaming consoles.

To this point, most of us think of ‘Next-Gen’ in terms of console power, playing off ‘cell processors’ with amounts of ‘memory cache’ and so forth.

But Daglow (President and CEO of  Stormfront Studios – Neverwinter Nights, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers) is more about changing the game paradigm.

"I'm sure that somewhere in this little section of this room, there's somebody who does not believe the Wii is next-gen," he said.
"It does not have the processing power the 360 or the PS3 do, and you can make the consistent argument that, without that processing power, it can not revolutionise the entire experience. That's debatable, and we get to decide."

"Nobody gets to tell us what we think is next-gen - we get to decide for ourselves. I can help start arguing, but we get to decide for ourselves."

Daglow challenged the audience to look beyond the mere power output of a platform, to instead analyze the user experience
"Next-gen hardware is any platform that, upon its introduction, dramatically changes players' view of the potential for interactive entertainment," he said,

"If it changes the player's view of what interactive entertainment is; if you think differently about it; if you have a new perspective after playing the game that you didn't have before, to me that's next-gen,"

Daglow has the history behind him to make such observations, having spent time at Intellivision, Broderbund and EA.  He has seen a number of 'Next-Gen' platforms come and go over the years.

A lot of gaming journalism (myself included) has been guilty of leaving the Wii off the ‘Next-Gen’ shelf.  This is especially true as both Sony and Microsoft continue to butt chests in a PR and price war as they compete for consumer dollars. 

Meanwhile those same consumers are simply voting with their wallets, snapping up Wii’s all over the world simply for the ‘Next-Gen User Experience’.