Should Nintendo try it's hand at "mature casual games"?

[Podings]

TheMisterManGuy said:

Podings said:
Nintendo's bread and butter has always been family friendly core games, so "adult casual" seems like going the opposite way. Which might be good for diversity, I won't rule that out. :)

As long as we're not strip poker.

Switch reaches a much more diverse audience than the Wii U ever did. And with games like Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and third party titles like Doom selling well, Nintendo shouldn't hesitate to try something aimed more at casual adult gamers. 

I totally know what you're saying, but your two examples are anything but casual.
Nintendo did make some strides in adult casual, with games like Brain Age and Wii Fit, and some of the other stuff on Wii and DS.
At least if you mean casual in the retention-over-time way that it's used in mobile games now. And adult as in not really appealing to children.

They have apparently found this particular kind of successes quite hard to replicate though. They still have casual stuff like their mobile games of course, even if it's not utilitarian in the same way. And something like FE Heroes isn't something I'd say really have much appeal to children. At least, the children I know play Pokémon Go instead.

Now, OP mentions stuff like Hotel Dusk. And that I could dig. I liked the Trace Memory games a lot. But the target demographic was apparently so narrow that Nintendo eventually stopped working with Cing. Visually pleasant puzzlers like Monument Valley is something I'd personally also categorize as adult casual, and those I like a lot. I'd like for more of the stylish puzzlers from iOS to make it over, or for Nintendo to introduce some of their own.

Hidden object games with murder mystery stories could also fall in that category. And I think there's a few already on Switch? At least there was on Wii U. These fall quite far outside of anything Nintendo's been making though, but it'd be great to see them shape up the genre.

Of course, if what people are REALLY talking about in here is mostly story based adventure games with simple puzzles and a lot of character interaction, which both Night in the Woods and Hotel Dusk essentially are, then that's a genre that directly goes against most of the mantras that Miyamoto champions. Not saying they won't do it, but it hasn't ever really happened in-house. Cing was the only dev in the genre they ever really published for, and they're gone now. :/