I'm totally against that but it might be more controllable with Nintendo. I wouldn't hold my breath. Look what its done to the PC gaming industry and the consoles. Developers become so dam lazy it becomes a race to yearly profit cycles and we the consumer end up with half ass finished game requiring a substantial download to patch, spanning weeks to months to even play the game as intended.
Now companies are becoming more sneaky and greedy then ever before to turn a profit. I fully expect games & patch EULAs to come with a no sue clause upon installation & use going forward.
Don't trust the cloud it will piss on you, Science says.
What is Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing? It was released before the internet took over, it was a buggy piece of crapware and it sold well.
PC gaming (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X) isn't a walled garden like consoles have been since their inception so we see trends in it long before the walled garden claims it as its own. The trend for the last five years is towards a subscription, entirely internet based model where you buy (subscribe) to a digital product and are entitled, through that subscription, to unlimited downloads and unlimited play time by that subscription (TOS violations excluded, of course). It doesn't stop piracy but because there is no physical medium and there isn't lots of middleman, prices can go lower which broadens the market willing to buy and also affords larger profit margins for publishers.
The only reason why the current generation of consoles haven't gone this way entirely is because they would have to ask for more upfront money to install hard drives that aren't rubbish.
There's only two reasons why consoles have been relevant, since ever:
1) lower hardware cost
2) simplicity
The first will always be true for the same reason a Ford will always be cheaper than a Rolls Royce. Mass production translates to savings. I can't name one model of computer that has ever sold 10s of millions of units because it simply doesn't happen. The PC industry is full of variables and the console industry consistently lacks them (where it matters anyway).
The second is losing relevance due to XInput which made Xbox 360 controller support in games a common thing. Steam Machines is also tackling the hardware front of it. The fact two out of three consoles this generation use the same CPU architecture as PC and the next Nintendo system will make that thee out of three, they're rapidly losing this edge.
That's really all Nintendo has. Nintendo games are cheaper if I recall, they just never drop in value--they launch at $40 or $50 compared to others $60, and stay around that $40 mark until the systems EoL. The problem is that the Wii U doesn't do enough to justify getting it over a PS4 or Xbox One. You can't play Blu-Rays, are basically stuck with a single streaming service, it's woefully inferior hardware, the defining feature only benefits one player (told people for monthes you would never see more than one tablet controller running), and even with backwards compatability there isn't enough to make up for the anemic 3rd party lineup. If you only love Mario and Zelda, then get a Wii U, but if you want an all in one media box that plays a wide variety of games, the Wii U is a waste.
Nintendo games have substantially less production cost than AAA titles on other platforms simply because Nintendo hardware has always had severe limitations in terms of capabilities. Why design really fantastic models and produce high resolution textures when you know the console can't handle them anyway?
