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Soundwave on 06 July 2014
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RolStoppable said:
Soundwave said:

It's not a moot point because the casual audience doesn't really care that much about any specific titles, they just want enough selection/variety for them to have fun. They are not fussy like "hardcore" gamers who will freak out not only if they don't get just the right, exact lineup of games they want, but freak out over details like how cell shaded Zelda is or whether Raiden or Snake is the main character in the 50th Metal Gear game. 

Just because you kissed a girl at a nightclub, doesn't mean she pledged her undying love to you or even wants to date you. That's all Nintendo got with the Wii and casuals ... a hook up, maybe a one night stand at best, but they weren't married to Nintendo.  

Sorry I lost track about the hardcore gamer bit? Nintendo actually always has been a 'hardcore' gaming company to be honest. Even the original Donkey Kong is a frustratingly difficult game, Nintendo's always been a hardcore game company, they just opted to wrap their games in a faux Disney-style packaging with warm colors and friendly characters (most of the time). 

In the 90s at the height of the SNES-Genesis war for example Hiroshi Yamauchi so incensed that Arakawa had allowed Sega to paint Nintendo as a company for "kids only" that he threatened to fire him (his own son in law, lol! hugely taboo in Japanese business culture) unless he shaped up in a public interview. It was after that time that Nintendo greenlit projects like Killer Instinct and the "Play It Loud" ad campaign to directly respond to Sega.  

So your argument is that casuals are fickle and that there is no chance that they will return to Nintendo. They weren't married to Nintendo, but are now married to smartphones.

Nintendo's success in the video games business started in the arcades. The arcades are the origins of massmarket gaming. Gaming didn't become popular because it was hardcore. Consequently, Nintendo was not a hardcore gaming company. Donkey Kong was not hardcore. But anyway, my earlier question was:

By the way, if that "casual" audience already makes you so angry, what do you think of the hardcore gamers that demand that Nintendo should become like Sony and Microsoft?


They are married to smartphones in a sense actually because smartphones are integral to their day to day life. They don't need (and never really did need) a gaming machine. 

Nintendo is closer to Sony and Microsoft than they are to the type of basement development/fad based gaming that defines the casual gaming trends of today. 

The difference really is that Sony/MS are far better at marketing than Nintendo was and took advantage of some mistakes that Nintendo made in the late 90s/2000s to force Nintendo into an uncomfortable position. But they're not exactly reinventing the wheel, they just took what Nintendo did with the NES/SNES and took it to its logical conclusion (if you liked games at age 12, you'll probably still like them at age 22, not exactly rocket science and Sony wasn't even the first to put 2 and 2 together here). 

Casual gamers don't make me "angry" either, I'm just pointing something you yourself actually have pointed out too ... there is a "disconnect" (your own words) between Nintendo and so-called casual audience. That's because Nintendo never was a casual company to begin with, Wii Sports is not really indicative of the general type of game they've made the last 20-30 years. And casual gamers weren't interested in the standard type of Nintendo game.

Using the girl analogy, does a guy really have a right to be mad at a girl for not falling in love with him? If she's in her college years and just wants to party ... I don't begrudge her, just be happy you hooked up with her once, dude, but she's not down for a relationship either. You were never really her type, you just made her laugh and were the token "fun guy at the bar that night" that she decided to hook up with. Enjoy it for what it was, and move on when its over, lol. 

The problem for Nintendo though is that cheap/casual gaming culture on phones/tablets is killing their future audience with kids too. That's where it really hurts. That's where Nintendo is being pushed out of their comfort zones and not being able to find a reliable audience anywhere.