Over at Lost Garden, erstwhile game designer and now-middleware creator Danc offers his thoughts on the Revolution controller and genre innovation. Some interesting excerpts:
One of the easiest ways of creating a new genre is to invent a new series of verbs (or risk mechanics as I called them in my Genre Life Cycle articles). One of the easiest ways of inventing new verbs is to create new input opportunities. Nintendo controls their hardware and they leverage this control to suit their particular business model...
Nintendo needs to control their hardware platform in order to force innovation to occur in the control mechanisms. Other console manufacturers who rely on the hardcore audiences and standardized genres dont see this need. They would happily standardize the console platform and make it into a commodity. Microsoft has historically made major comments about having one universal development platform.
The moment Nintendo loses control over their hardware, they lose a major competitive advantage in terms of creating new genres.