Nintendo knows best when it comes to HD?

Here's a quick summary of an opinion piece passed on to us from one of our eagle-eyed readers:

While this is little surprise from a Nintendo fansite, it does bear looking into. Nintendo has publicly stated that they don't care about HD, and they think gameplay trumps graphics. Some of the other blogs on this network might have more to say about the gameplay side; we'll focus a little on the high-def issue here: Does HD have any affect on console sales? Assuming that Microsoft's console was bundled by default with an HD DVD add-on, the cost would be about the same for both the PS3 and the Xbox 360. Both of these consoles also tout their high-resolution games as a selling point. According to the article, Nintendo made the right choice by completely bowing out of the competition to create higher-resolution gaming. Naysayers claim that not many people own HDTVs anyway, and so why add the cost of the hardware to the console price.

Of course, by that definition HD Beat caters to the early adopter crowd too, according to the market research quoted in the piece not many people have the technology to view high definition, so it doesn't make sense to produce anything relating to it. Yet for the past few years, all the major television networks have -- with the exception of reality and news programming -- produced their programming in HD. Satellite, cable, and phone distributors have spent billions of dollars launching new satellites and building new infrastructure to provide for it. All the movie studios are picking sides in a major format war to get revenue from it. And every electronics manufacturer has built or licensed new products to extract profits from it.

So, welcome yourself to our "exclusive" club, and ponder this: Does HD matter when it comes to the big picture of console sales, and entertainment in general? Or do things like cost, gameplay, and content matter more than high definition?

[ Thanks Jason Unger ]