Insomniac CEO: PS3 Will Win, Wii Is A Fad

Insomniac Games CEO Brian Hastings has posted to his company's message board (registration required, mirror here) a massive list of reasons the PlayStation 3 will, contrary to popular opinion, "win this console generation." Example:

The problem with including a hard drive in one version of the 360 and not in the other is that developers can’t use it for the games. Or, at least, they can’t use it for any required features. When you are guaranteed to have at least a 20 GB hard drive in the console, you can write your load caching routines around it, or use it for your application’s storage needs. To a developer, an optional hard drive is roughly equivalent to no hard drive at all.

Entirely true. But although Hastings goes out of the way to emphasize at the beginning of his piece that Insomniac is an independent developer, they are inextricably tied to Sony, providing top-tier games like Resistance and Ratchet & Clank. So while Hastings does a decent job of hyping up PS3, he's far from an unbiased source as you can get; this is like reading Miyamoto explaining why Wii will win.

Speaking of which...

...here's what Hastings says about Wii:

The Wii is currently riding on a massive wave of mainstream attention and has been purchased by lots of people who don’t normally play games.
But how many of those people who are hooked on Wii Sports will also buy
Wii Need For Speed? Mainstream fads usually run their course within a year. As the honeymoon period fades, the Wii will be going up against more and more graphically impressive games on the PS3 and Xbox 360.
More people will be buying HD televisions and looking for the most immersive and stunning experiences available. For these reasons, I think the Wii will be more successful than the GameCube or N64 but in the long run will still be outsold by the PS3.

This is some weak thinking. I'll spare you the sermon about how this is exactly what everyone was saying about the Nintendo DS -- that it was only selling because of the gimmick, and that the PSP would overtake it easily because it was more graphically impressive. This turned out to be completely wrong. I agree that the Wii can't run on Wii Sports forever; if that was Nintendo's intention, then of course it would run the same course as Tamagotchi or Pet Rocks or whatever. But all Wii needs is another piece of software that's just as compelling, and suddenly there's another reason to buy it. This isn't rocket science; this is exactly what happened with Nintendogs, then Brain Age.

And I am pretty skeptical of the suggestion that everyone who buys an HDTV automatically rejects any potential accessory that doesn't run in 720p. Research is showing that lots of HDTV buyers are just plugging in their usual cable antenna and not bothering to order high-def channels, or using their same old DVD player with composite cables because it "looks fine." If anything, Wii is more likely to illustrate in the long term that the super powers of PS3 and Xbox 360 have overshot the needs of the market, not that Wii has failed to reach them.