The Wii is not dead or dying.

[LordTheNightKnight]

padib said:

LordTheNightKnight said:

"As for who's right or wrong in terms of Nintendo's future, only time will tell. But by the trend we saw lately, I couldn't see them sustain interest by continuing in the same old direction. PS360 are gaining momentum by each passing day, so the good old Nintendo Wii/DS strategy seems at least presently defeated. Discussed ad nauseam in thread"

They stopped that same old direction. That's why the Wii lost momentum. They had to have stayed on it to keep the Wii moving up, or gotten back on it to get the Wii back on track.

If Iwata revived Hal Laboratories, and if he revived the Nintendo brand with the Wii/DS for a time, I definitely trust his judgement with this. They will reintegrate that strategy when they have a more balanced offering. In the mean time, by the nature of the casual consumer, that market was not sustainable in and of itself. That base has no brand faithfulness to hardware whatsoever. They have brand faithfulness to software, but 1st parties aren't the only ones making software, and can't on their own keep up to demand. On the hardware side of things, as an example, if Kinect one ups the Wii, they will all move there. They are a very volatile consumerbase, and Nintendo is very wise not to commit their business solely to them. Moreover, the 3rd party issue has been known for more than a decade. If this is the time for Nintendo to finally clean that mess up, they should make the most of this opportunity, as it is no doubt vital for them long term.

But suppose for a minute that even that were irrelevant, nonetheless Nintendo has every intent to capture both the casual and the core market because I believe, to their surprise, the core market is actually much broader than Nintendo had originally understood it to be. They would be fools not to go after it...

The same casual fallacy, and pretending they are flighty. Bull. Mainstream gamers have shown the games they like are focused on raw fun. They have not changed that, as the bestselling games ever made are all variations of that. If anyone abandons at the first opportunity, it's developers. They stopped making games the mainstream liked when they were bored with making them. And I don't just mean Nintendo.