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Soundwave on 31 July 2013
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the_dengle said:
Soundwave said:

Wii Sports was the MAIN thing about the Wii. It defined motion gaming and inspired a hundred knock offs. That's why millions and millions and millions of people flooded in. Mario games just piggybacked off that success to monster numbers, but casuals won't buy a seperate console JUST for Mario and other Nintendo franchises. If that was the case, the Wii U should be doing at least OK as it already has a major Mario game on it already.

So what was the MAIN thing about the DS? If casuals won't buy a console JUST for Mario, how did the DS versions of New Super Mario Bros, Mario Kart, etc sell so well compared to previous iterations -- even compared to Wii iterations? What games were THEY piggybacking off of?

Think really hard on that, and give me whatever bogus answer you come up with. Then tell me what games are responsible for the 3DS's success. And explain again how "casuals" won't buy a console for Mario, or convince me that handhelds and home consoles are so dramatically different that these situations are entirely inapplicable to one another.


Because the handheld market is a completely different market from the home console market. As is pretty obvious by the fact that the Game Boy/GBA outsold the N64 and GameCube by several times and even the DS outsold the Wii rather easily. Nintendo always tends to have an easier time with the handheld market ever since the SNES cycle ended.

Handhelds tend to skew more towards the kids audience, and Nintendo is one of the few publishers in the world that actually really tries with their handheld software. Arguably they're the only non-iOS/Android publisher that takes handheld gaming as seriously as console gaming. So they stand out a lot more in that market.

Sony tried to market the whole "handheld for teenagers and 20-somethings" concept with the PSP and ultimately it ran out of gas because older teenagers and adults don't want to carry around a gaming portable. And now that there are smartphones and tablets, it's wiped out whatever there was of the PSP audience pretty much entirely.

If people were willing to buy a console for Mario, there's no reason to wait. The Wii U already has NSMBU, the sequel to the 27 million selling NSMB Wii, which is the second best selling Mario platformer ever and probably the best quality NSMB that Nintendo has released to date.

The casual audience doesn't go crazy about Mario alone. They're not going to buy a completely seperate $200-$300 console just to play the 5 or 6 really big Nintendo franchises. Wii Sports and motion gaming is what drove people crazy in 2006. I had like 10 casual friends buy a Wii back then, some of them who had never bought a game console before or hadn't had one in ages and they were driving to like 8-9 stores and waiting in line in the freezing cold to get one.

Today, none of them have even uttered a peep about the Wii U and when I try to explain the concept to them it just illicts a polite "oh that's neat" and on to the next thing. No real interest whatsoever.

People need to understand motion gaming and Wii Sports was not just "one feature" about the Wii.