"Leaving Sony as the sole console developer to tend to hardcore gamers now."
I'll let someone else decide which of these two is the case:
1) I am not a "hardcore gamer."
2) Nintendo is not tending to my needs as a "hardcore gamer."
One of them must be true, because if I am one of these hardcore gamers the article speaks of, and Nintendo fulfills my gaming needs, that would make the above statement incorrect.
Either way, I can't be bothered to worry about it myself. You guys worry about it while I inform Ubisoft that despite exceeding 6.5 million sales, Just Dance 4 was a colossal failure because the casual bubble has burst.
PS, I find several of the article's suggestions downright offensive, including but not limited to:
• The suggestion that attempting to expand the market is some kind of insidious ploy that will ultimately damage the industry, and that the industry should try to stay small and niche and not try to appeal to any audience other than *barf* "hardcore gamers."
• The suggestion that the Wii was the first such attempt to expand the market, ignoring that Sony did the very same thing with the PS2 by selling it as a DVD player to customers who otherwise wouldn't have been interested in a gaming console, and even before that, Nintendo doing the same with ROB and the NES.
• The suggestion that the "casual gamers" migrating en masse from consoles to mobile devices is somehow to blame for the financial troubles of THQ, Square Enix, EA, and other companies, and not those companies' own poor financial decisions and out-of-control spending.
• As always, the suggestion that the entire gaming market -- nay, the entire world -- can be split cleanly into two demographics not plainly defined by any tangible means (e.g., gender, nationality, income, age, etc.), but by abstract qualities, vague details no one can agree on, leading to contradictions and misunderstandings.
Here is one such contradiction -- the article suggests that Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate is the first Wii U game that might appeal to "hardcore gamers." I infer that New Super Mario Bros. does not, then, appeal to "hardcore gamers." Yet it also states that the "casual gamers" have no brand loyalty and aren't interested in console gaming any more -- well, you could have fooled Mario, whose games have been selling pretty well -- consistently well -- for a long time. Mario is still selling, so which is it, is Mario hardcore or is the casual audience still around?
