Over on our sister site DVICE, Kevin Hall has written an intriguing pre-obituary for the Wii. He acknowledges its remarkable success, but lists a few reasons that he thinks it's going to be surpassed in the three-way race among Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft.

While he's got some good points, particularly about the viability of Nintendo as a platform for third-party games, he puts way too much stock in the usual canards put forth by us hard-core gamers: the Wii doesn't have fancy graphics and online support. Now I love my eye candy and multiplayer games as much as the next guy. But all of the Wii's success has been had while it was clearly bested on both those fronts by two other consoles. Yet Hall sees this as something that will doom the Wii going forward. Furthermore, he suggests the Wii's unique advantages aren't sustainable.

...what the Wii was in the beginning -- a cheaper console banking on motion-controlled innovation -- becomes moot point when the other systems drop prices and add the very same. The pressure's on, Nintendo. The Wii doesn't have the stamina to finish this race.

I couldn't disagree more with Hall's overall premise. He misses the curical point that the Wii has been and will likely continue to be immensely profitable for Nintendo. If you use profitability as a metric for health, the Wii is going strong and shows no sign of letting up. Furthermore, if you use profitability as a metric for success, Microsoft or Sony are never going to rival Nintendo's success. It seems to me reports of the Wii's impending demise are greatly exaggerated.

Plus, just look at that kid up there. No one in the history of reactions has ever had that reaction to a Playstation or Xbox. By the time you're old enough to get one of those systems, you're too cool for that level of unbridled insane enthusiasm. That kid is going to buy Nintendo systems and Mario games until he's outgrown them, at which point he's going to buy Nintendo systems and Mario games for his own kids.