Soundwave said:
To an extent too I think motion gaming as it exists today kind of hit a brick wall after people got over the initial "wow" factor of it.
It wasn't popular with many genres for starters, when divorced from simple to understand concepts that a beginner could easily equate to some kind of reality (like say bowling or tennis or dancing or jogging or steering a wheel), it's appeal became fairly limited. There's only so many party sports/dance/fitness games you can make before saturation hits and indeed the market became flooded with these types of games. There was no need for smartphones to "replace" Wii Sports ... Wii Sports as a "hot thing" cooled all on its own.
Attempts to make more fantasy based, level-clearing/quest based motion games never took off with motion gaming really in any big way. Star Wars Kinect, Red Steel 2, Fable: The Journey, Sony's Sorcery (which actually was a pretty nice use of the motion controller), even Zelda: Skyward Sword ... none of these were exactly blockbuster hits.
I think motion gaming's future really lies with virtual reality now, but as a standalone driver for software sales, it's lost a lot of its buzz. The first time you ride a bicycle, it's amazing. The 10,000th time you do it, you don't even think about it, people I think got their fill of waving their arms around in front of their TV after a couple of years of having their Wii/Kinect.
That's *part* of the problem, though a bigger issue is that same audience now has a smartphone in their pocket all the time too, which satiates their gaming needs when ever they have a spare 15-20 minutes in an extremely user friendly setup. Apple/Android usurped Nintendo as the lead voice for casual gamers a long time ago really, Nintendo hasn't made a big hit worldwide casual IP since Wii Fit in 2008, which is now 6+ years old (an eternity in entertainment cycles).
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it didnt take off cause the technology sucked. Thats what happens. Hell i would argue it barely worked in even some of those minigame compilations (looking at you wiisports boxing) sure they released stuff later that worked better but those should have been at the forefront.
I think the problem is those blue ocean gamers never really cared about gaming. Ninty got alot of flack for not making those guys migrate to other types of games. But that was always a dumb thought. Your aunty who got WIi for WIiSPorts the soccer mom for WiiFit was never interested in anything but those games, and they were never going to migrate. Just get bored and move on.
