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Gamerace on 09 July 2012
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archbrix said:
Gamerace said:
Nintendo has put themselves out of an audience except for diehard Nintendo fans which gives WiiU sales of 20M tops (similar to GC).

So, can I quote you as saying this?

Just curious, as I'm kinda keeping a mental note of all of the people who actually believe this.


I can't stop you.  But I was also the odd ball out that predicted Wii would have a 20m first year when everyone thought it would fail.

However, my point is Nintendo diehard fans aren't as numerous as people on forums like this tend to think.  Core Nintendo series (Zelda, 3D Mario, Donkey Kong Country, Metroid, Star Fox, FZero, Kirby, Pikmin, Fire Emblem) tend to only sell 1-8m.    Brawl managed 10m on Wii.   Mario Kart, NSMB, sometimes Animal Crossing and Pokemon are really the only mega sellers and they have more cross appeal with casuals.  Otherwise Nintendo's big guns are casual titles: Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Nintendogs, Brain Age, etc.

Nintendo is launching WiiU with several titles to appeal to casuals: NSMBU, Wii Fit U, NintendoLand, Game and Wario.   Problems are:  People think WiiU is a new Wii controller.  The gamepad reintroduces everything the Wii eliminated (excess knobs and buttons, complexity, more focus on solidary play).  They just released a NSMB2 on 3DS, and NSMBWii wasn't that long ago.  NSMBU and Wii Fit U look far too similar to their Wii counterparts.  The gamepad doesn't seem to add anything really enticing to them.  So why pay $250-299 plus new versions of the same games?    NintendoLand is the best thing they've shown.   But I didn't see anything with that that will really make people take notice.    There's nothing revolutionary like touchscreen was for DS, motion for Wii or Kinect.   If this came out 6 years ago, it'd have been huge.   But we all own smartphones, ipods, tablets, 3DS, DS, Vita, etc. already.   It doesn't 'feel' new.   Asymetric gameplay.... That's a hard sell.  It's not an obvious plus.

Nintendo will have a hard time invigorating people's imagination with WiiU.

Regardless, Wii, Kinect, indeed even Apple have expanded the market and some of that must go to WiiU.   So add some percentage of the casual market onto the 20m Nintendo fanboys WiiU is sure to get and that's WiiU's likely lifetime sales.     Figure 30-60M    

Other factors:   Apple could enter and greatly disturb the home console market.  New tech could make Cloud gaming a mainstream reality a lot sooner than expected.