FTC-Xbox hearing dares to ask: What console gen is Nintendo?

polygon.com:

One of the more amusing tangles Microsoft, Sony, and the Federal Trade Commission have gotten into over the past week is something that has roiled video game forums, and particularly riled Nintendo fans, for nearly two decades: Is Nintendo’s latest console part of the current generation?

Even if, as Xbox boss Phil Spencer said on Friday, the “console wars” are a social construction, this is still something that has built up since the days of the Wii and a memorable Game Developers Conference rant in which a Maxis developer dismissed Nintendo’s then-new console as “two GameCubes duct-taped together.”

The argument returned in force when the Wii U launched in 2012, and there was much garment-rending over whether Nintendo’s first high-definition console was part of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 console generation, or if it had begun the next generation. I remember, vividly, the resentment from Wii U fans when Activision PR played coy about the idea of Call of Duty: Ghosts launching on Wii U. (It was the last Call of Duty to launch on a Nintendo platform.) And it didn’t help that the Wii U was a clunker at retail, and that third-party publishers all but gave up on Nintendo at the time.

Today, it’s no longer a console-wars pub argument. The FTC is asking a judge to stop Microsoft’s $68.7 billion acquisition of Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard, contending that a console maker with that kind of publishing scope and control would harm consumers and the marketplace. The question is, who is part of that marketplace?

Lawyers for the government and Microsoft have offered competing visions of what that market is: If it’s just PlayStation and Xbox, it’s a little easier to argue Microsoft gets an unfair advantage in acquiring