Sure it's fun. They come over, it's social, it's highly interactive... fun. I get that. But would they purchase a Wii for themselves and enough games for themselves to make it a viable contender in the marketplace? Maybe some people do purchase enough multi-player games and have game parties to make this a competitive system, I really don't know and that's probably something that's still remain to bee seen.

But my guess is that consoles are sold on a very thin margin and what makes them profitable is the amount of games that can be developed and sold and the people that buy those games are those that would be playing no matter what kind of interface it had. The days of a couple of guys in their garage making games just for the sheer joy of it are long gone. It take a lot of money and resources to produce a game today and most of the major players are just not going to take a chance on something that doesn't have a very broad user base.

I give Nintendo a lot of credit for entering the scene when it was dying niche, pumping life into it and taking it to whole new levels. They also have been masters at telling the public what it wants regardless of what anyone else was doing at the time and have generally been right about that. But it still comes down to console sales being the driving force behind getting more games developed and produced. That's where I'm still not sure enjoying a friend's console translates into buying your own and subsequently buying enough titles to support the console comes in.