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Soundwave on 07 June 2014
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RolStoppable said:
Soundwave said:

Explain to us what "a console like Wii" means specifically. 

Is a console that uses the Wiimote, looks like the Wii, has the Wii brand, has Wii Fit, has Wii Sports, has New Super Mario Bros. U, has Wii Party, has half of its Nintendo lineup based around mini-game/party compilations, and all the marketing is aimed at the family audience not "Wii" enough? OK we get it, it wasn't "Wii" enough for you, but I think you're missing the bigger picture here. 

Hell, when inflation is taken into account, the Wii U wasn't even that much more expensive than the Wii and it saves money by really not requiring an extra controller as most people have a Wiimote in their home already. Wii was really $300+ after you had to buy a second Wiimote + nunchaku.

The problem wasn't any of that. The problem is there's no audience for simple-to-play/quick fix gaming on a console anymore. Why? Because a smartphone aped that formula away from Nintendo and started offering it at a price Nintendo could not compete with. THAT is the big picture. Nintendo did correctly realize that there was a large potential audience of people who simply wanted to play simply/easy to pick up games for short periods of time and the way to get them was easy to use control interfaces. 

And it was great ... for a while. Then Apple/Android took that concept and ran over Nintendo (and Blackberry and Microsoft and about a dozen other proud companies) in the process. 

Nintendo Land is a game that would've been a monstrous success for Nintendo had it been released in say 2008 instead of 2012. That audience that wanted easy to pick up and play/arcade-style games would've been all over it in 2008, but by 2012 the world had changed. 

There's just no denying it, look at the difference between these two Pope inagurations:

In 2005, no one had a smartphone/tablet ... in 2013 ... everyone has one, making a Wii or DS a much less desirable commodity even if Nintendo followed the *exact* same formula to a tee. 

People don't want the Gamepad. The Wii U is the Gamepad.

And you still struggle to grasp my point that slapping Wii stuff on a GameCube doesn't make a GC a Wii. The people who didn't buy the GC are grasping it, that's why they aren't buying the Wii U. Nintendo is right back to their trend of declining home console sales, because they ditched the strategy that allowed them to defy the trend. Do you know what Nintendo's four consoles of decline have in common? They all employed a red ocean strategy.

So explain to me exactly what would've been a blue ocean strategy for the Wii successor? Because it seems like a vague, magical maguffin.

Spell it out exactly and explain to me why a person who can get their  casual-centric/easy-to-play/intuitive interface gaming fix for free or for $1 a pop would chose to run to a store and buy the Nintendo alternative to what they have already in their pocket at all times. 

I think any strategy undertaken by Nintendo to aim at casuals this generation was simply going to be a dead end no matter what. There was no controller invention that would change that because the hold of Apple/Android on the potential market for a machine that relies on people who prefer casual/bright + colorful/easy to play games was such that nothing could shake it by the time 2010 dawned. 

Apple and Android not only ruined Nintendo's blue ocean by turning it blood run, they took a giant sh*t in the middle of it too making it red-brown, lol, by destryoing the business model that Nintendo relied on. Once you could get games for 99 cents/free, suddenly Nintendo's proposition, whatever it was was always going to fall on deaf ears. That was something Sony/MS never did, they may have "beat" Nintendo, but they always agreed upon Nintendo's rules in doing so. Apple/Android are much more of a stab through Nintendo's heart. 

Not to say that the opposite would've been much easier of a path for Nintendo, but then again, in real life, there's no gauruntee of an "easy path", perhaps the reality is Nintendo had two hard paths this generation, and it was going to be hard for them either way.