A good thread.
The Wii audience, is in fact the general gaming audience, Ps3 and Xbox are the hardcore audience.
In every industry, the general consumers are characterized by these things:
1. Time conscious, They want their product to achieve its MAIN purpose quick and easy, no hassles
2. Cost conscious, therefore Are not interested in small iterative improvements in successive products
It is therefore easy to see why it is always a certain type of game that sells well, the arcade style game.
Why? because arcade games achieve the purpose of games better and quicker then any other type of game, and that is, to have FUN.
Mario kart, Wii Sports (and resort), NSMBW, Wii Fit.
It is also easy to see why sequels don't seem to work very well with these types of games.
This is contrasted with the hardcore audience which are actually synonymous with the type of consumer called 'early adopters' and also, in general, rich consumers with too much time on their hands.
1. Want their time to be consumed, therefore actually like time consuming games, which pretty much is every AAA title game on Ps3/Xbox
2. Not cost conscious (so act as if their rich), tend to buy every sequel even if the improvements aren't that substantial (Final fantasy).
Because of this, Nintendo is in a very peculiar situation being in the game industry.
The game industry, traditionally, has been very sequelitis,repeating same gameplay with only small differences, but the main audience of the Wii don't like that, so nintendo is actually forced to make their system moving titles to be extremely unique, one after the other.
This wouldn't be so much of a problem if 3rd party companies actually made games for the audience of the Wii, instead of making hardcore games on the Wii and expecting it to do as well as on PS3/Xbox, which has most of the hardcore audience.
