| Mr Khan said: ... 2: Your argument has been made before, by others, that Wii has found a "niche," when really its rather the opposite. Wii has found the mainstream 3: It's a phenomenon called Gamer Drift, and it is real. The gaming industry got caught up in the graphical arms race, and many of the gamers who played long ago were left behind. This is not the sign of a healthy, growing industry, just one that's trying to stay afloat. |
I doubt there's such thing as the mainstream. I'd rather say that there are lots of intersecting and nesting submarkets. The Wii did extremely well catering to old times' Nintendo gamers and to a wider, even less formed market that was intimidated by all games but found for example WiiSports and WiiFit accessible. It's not a niche, it's an extremely big submarket. It's also not a dominating one, though, as marketshares show: when all is said and done, the Wii and its low-entry-barrier gaming haven't dwarfed the competition.
The expansion thing happened in the past: when the PS1 boomed, I saw people who I never thought would get a console controller in their hands buy one to play football games. When the GTA phenomenon began, it was by expanding into a market of teenage casual gamers who would never think a game could be "cool" -save maybe carmageddon. Back then, it was a different kind of barrier that was broken down, something relating to the stigma of console gaming being only for little kids, maybe.
At the same time, as you said, many gamers were left behind. But it has nothing to do with the "graphical arms race". Most of them were left behind by gaming that required more than a joystick and a single button, or by games that required memorizing combos, or that required an excessively long training time.
I very much doubt there's any gamer that was perfectly comfortable with gaming in the PS2 era, but found him/herself baffled by nowadays' games. Uncharted 2 is no more complex or reliant on graphics than RE4 for example, epitomizing as it might be of the tech focus and the "graphical arms race"
It's -instead- an old problem, tracing back to the NES vs home computers times. I'm glad Nintendo is catering for those users who need different games from where most of the developers were going, but it isn't the magic bullet to solve all of the industry's problems. On the contrary, I suspect that with things like WiiFit, WiiSports, Brain Training we're very near to the most basic baseline when it comes to accessibility. Once everybody taps into that long neglected market, growth will have to happen in different directions again.
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