The hardcore abandoned Nintendo; Nintendo didn't abandon the hardcore

[binary solo]

I think hardcore is played out as a description of a significant demographic. the spectrum isn;t between hardcore and casual gamer and points in between, it's between hobbyist and casual gamers. Hobbyist gamers choose to play video games as a priority over most or all other forms of leisure activity. Casual gamers will play video games when there's nothing better to do, or as and when the social occasion calls for it.

Hardcore gamers are hobbyist gamers who pretty much devote their lives to gaming. They buy every system going each generation, and they probably also maintain a gaming PC which largely keeps track of high end performance. The number of these people in the world is counted in the handful of millions, and they really are not an audience which can be relied upon to give a system a sizeable install base. Wii U sells to these people, because these people always by every system Nintendo releases. It doesn't even matter if the Nintendo systems are their preferred systems for a given generation. There are Nintendo games they will want to play and they will not be willing to miss out just because the system is selling poorly.

A company has to appeal to the hobbyist gamer who buys 1, maybe 2, gaming platforms per generation. This is the group of gamers that is quite large, perhaps 100 million strong AND they buy a lot of games. They buy the annual franchises, they are willing to try new IP and help make them popular, they will typically own far more games for each system than the tie ratio we see here, but not as many games as the hard core. These are tyhe people that make the video game industry rival the movie industry for revenue, if not profitability.

Then there are the casuals, these people buy one system. They buy a few games, mostly party/social games and they pull the system out when the occasion calls for it. But they generally prefer doing other leisure / social things. But they do like playing video games from time to time. These people have traditionally numbered in the 10s of millions each generation. they help to sell the social games, and they might pick up a single player / online multiplayer game once or twice in a generation. They are reliable in what they do, but they can't be relied upon to generate profits for the industry. These people pretty much migrated from SNES to PS1, then PS2, then Wii. Now they are looking at the 8th gen and I think most of them are still waiting in the wings. many might well go for Wii U over the next few years, but a lot will go with PS4 too. In any case they are not a big enough market segment to have a meaningful effect on any one company.

Then you have non-gamers. Very few people are absolute non-gamers, most non-gamers play one or two free games on computer, phone or tablet. But they don't see themselves as being active in the video game industry, nor would they say they have any interest in video games. But for the first time quite a few of these people bought a gaming console with the Wii. They had a lot of fun. They bought several motion-controlled games. And then they lost interest, because playing a game in front of a TV is not their idea of a good time, even on an occasional basis. These people were the Wii fad. Without them Wii would have perhaps sold about 50-70 million and would have placed 3rd this generation. But very few of them became gamers of any description. They played Wii, they gre tired of Wii and now that they had their experience of video games they don't have the slightest inclination to take it up again. They especially have no inclination to buy yet another piece of hardware. Just to play sequels to the one or two games they played last generation. This is the Blue Ocean that Nintendo got, but who will not come back as a potential market for a few generations yet. And possibly not before the face of video gaming changes forever and the console era as we know it comes to an end.

Nintendo has the hard core. Nintendo has lost most of the mainstream. Nintendo may get a reasonable chunk of the casual gamer. There is no blue ocean available to anyone this generation. All that adds up to a fairly predicatble 15-25 million in hardware sales for the generation.

Also Wii U has already outsold the Dreamcast, so I'm not sure what the OP is on about there.