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Soundwave on 01 June 2015
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zorg1000 said:
Soundwave said:

The Wii U is very much a casual-family system. This is Nintendo's own marketing for the system from day 1:

 

But being casual doesn't mean you're gaurunteed to have some new controller craze every five years either. Just because you impressed casuals once, doesn't mean you have their life long consumer loyalty either. Nintendo underestimated how quickly casuals get tired of something and move on to something else. 

Probbaly because it doesn't register in Nintendo's vocabulary. In Nintendo's "logic" when you make a hit game ... like Mario or Zelda or Pokemon, the IP should be successful for 10 ... 20 ... even 30 years. They didn't understand the concept that Wii Fit or Nintendogs or Brian Training would just fizzle out after 5 years or so. The concept of that was completely alien to them. 


Being casual doesn't mean u need to release a new controller craze every 5 years, casuals just want/need a controller that is easily accessible that they can fully understand after a few minutes of use, something the Wii U Gamepad isn't and the fact that it caused Wii U to launch $100 over the Wii sure didn't help either.

Casuals are also looking for simple yet fun games with new concepts, Wii's later years and Wii U's early years did not offer these, games like Splatoon & Mario Maker are a step in the right direction but too little, too late. Had Wii U launched at $250 with Splatoon & Mario Maker along with a much stronger ad campaign and a better software output consisting of new IP that targeted kids/females/families in addition to their tradtitional IP than they would very likely be in a much better situation, not Wii levels of course but much better than the current situation.

Being casual actually does mean you need some kind of new "hook" every few years or the audience loses interest. Casuals are different from hardcore gamers in that way, they'll love Angry Birds for 4 years, but in the 5th year they'll get sick of it and never play it again. And they're cool with that. That's not like hardcore gamers where we like to play Mario, Madden, COD, Halo, for decades on end. 

So Nintendo was actually kinda right about that. The Wiimote was losing it's "wow" factor by 2010 or so. But you just can't "manfacture" a controller phenomenon, it's one of those things that happens once in a blue moon and Nintendo was lucky enough to have stumbled upon it because the Wiimote creator actually went to Sony first and Sony had their own wand controller in development for Eye Toy several years before that to boot. 

Splatoon is not really a casual game. It's a pretty hardcore game ... online only (basically) with a minimal offline mode and very limited local multi. Of course it has the Disney-esque art style over it, but that's just Nintendo's M.O. ... creating deep, actually hardcore game experiences, that are inviting with an initial easy learning curve. But Splatoon is basically Nintendo's first true online-centered game IP. 

So I don't think that would've made a difference with the Wii Sports crowd. Truth be told it's not like Nintendo Land was a terrible game. It's probably the best "casual" game Nintendo's ever made. We confuse "quality" with "market success", the two are not mutually exclusive. 

It helps I think to be able to pull off the "I'm a fan of company X/Y/Z" and just be able to look at things from the POV of other audience bases too. The iPhone changed the world. The world. I don't think I overstate that. The world it changed is one that Nintendo was not prepared for. 

To match what was happening to the casual market with smart devices, Nintendo had to step their game up 5 or 6 fold, problem is they had grown fat and lazy with the Wii's initial success and was in "cruise" mode. When the 3DS did not perform well out of the gate, it was a shock to Nintendo, but really there's nothing they could've done ... Nintendo is just a small fry in the overall ocean to be honest. Apple/Steve Jobs' destiny was simply bigger than theirs.