And that applies to their employees, too. Medicare is cheaper than providing real health insurance. Hahahaha. Walmart employees can't get sick. Sucks for them!

...they point out that most titles are written to be cross-platform, thus erasing a lot of the relative hardware benefits of each platform.

According to Gaving Carter's Slashdot interview three days ago, gaming companies still consider their biggest cross-platform challenge as "taking the big, grandiose things we set out to do and get them to work like they're supposed to".

But that's if we were talking about reduced hardware benefits. What Nintendo is doing is getting rid of the whole hardware capability. It won't be harder to implement a feature, it will be impossible. And not Perl-type impossible, where it just takes a couple of extra seconds to implement, but the real impossible.

And this is coming from a hardcore Nintendo fan. I've been playing Nintendo since I was five years old, and I've actually been inside Nintendo's corporate headquarters in Kyodo, Japan (don't tell the police).