Nintendo’s annual press conference at E3 happened yesterday at 9am, and as I sat in my chair watching a live video stream, I couldn’t help but wonder who was making all of the company’s business decisions. Their business is selling video game hardware and software, and they do this very, very well. As their graphs proudly displayed, they have sold more hardware and more software this console generation than their competitors, Microsoft and Sony. This is mainly due to reaching out to people that would otherwise not be considered video game players. But what they didn’t produce a graph for was how many ridiculous accessories they’ve made available as well.

Just off the top of my head, I can name the Wii Zapper, Steering Wheel, Balance Board, and Wireless Guitar, not to mention a dozen or so cheap plastic shells made available for the Wii Remote by third-party manufacturers. And that’s just for Wii – in the previous generation, the DK Bongos stick out especially well in my mind as a limited-use accessory for the GameCube. And for each of these accessories, I can think of one, maybe two games that use each.

The Wii Zapper came bundled with Link’s Crossbow Training, a fun but shallow target-practice pack-in, but the contraption did little more than hold the Wii Remote and Nunchuk together. The Steering Wheel can be found in any home with Mario Kart Wii, and the Balance Board is, at present, used for Wii Fit and a sports game by the name of We Ski. Finally, the Wireless Guitar has been used for all the various iterations of the Guitar Hero games.

This year at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, Nintendo unsurprisingly introduced even more accessories for its beloved console. The first is an attachment for the Wii Remote, named Wii MotionPlus. This attachment contains a gyroscope, which combined with the other remote data helps it figure out where it’s located in 3D space, as well as help measure things like torque data, which was impossible to do before. The second accessory is a microphone – the first official device to use one of the Wii’s USB ports – and it sits right on top of the sensor bar, allowing for voice chat in supported online games.

However, I have to step back and ask what the far-reaching effects of these new peripherals are. After all, I certainly don’t see a huge flood of games coming out to take advantage of those other accessories. Why should developers spend time including support for the microphone or more precise data from the Wii Remote when there’s not even a guarantee that gamers will have them?

Because these types of peripherals are optional, game developers would be very hard-pressed to develop a game that required any of these devices. From a business standpoint, they could potentially lose a lot of sales just because a potential customer doesn’t have what’s needed to play the game.

So, the remaining option is to create games with optional support for these accessories. That way, a sale would be much more likely when the consumer is assured that he or she could play regardless if they owned that particular accessory.

But, the minute an accessory becomes optional, it starts to have a less important role in the living room, and may even be discarded or forgotten because – hey, why would you want to spend the time setting it up when you could be actually playing the game quicker?

That was, of course, an extreme example. Most consumers would not discard something they just bought for entertainment, but another issue still presents itself – video game peripherals simply aren’t getting attention from very many games. As I mentioned above, the major add-ons for Nintendo’s console this generation have hardly seen any use at all outside of the game they were originally designed around.

I will admit that both a Wii Remote “extension” for more accurate motion control and a microphone designed to listen to everyone in the room seem to have a lot more practical applications for future games, but game accessories I’ve seen so far are poorly thought out, resulting in an almost identical “shelf life” to the game it was purchased with.

What I hope to see in the future is both the foresight to include any hardware needed to play games included with a console right from the start, and broader game support for well thought-out accessories that do happen to get released. Without these, the future market could very quickly become saturated with accessories that have hardly any use. While the people looking at Nintendo’s bottom line would be happy, not very many gamers would be smiling about it after a while.