Currently Online 
freebs2 said:
I undersrtand what you mean, I'm all in for variety but "hardcore" games like Xenoblade or Metroid (unfortunately) will never move a huge amount of consoles for Nintendo; their purpose is to serve top users and generate goodwill from the media - but those top users have likely bought the 3DS or the WiiU anyway. It's not really a matter of M-rated VS E-rated games, its more a matter of consistency between the target, the console's market offering and the content. To make an example, take New Super Mario Bros Wii vs New Super Mario Bros U The Wii's market offering can be summarized as: local multplayer that is affordable and for everyone. Nintendo knew that, in fact they have turned an historically single player game into 4-player platform/party game. It was an instant success, beacuse for the market it was clear what the Wii was offering and NSMBU perfectly realized that promise: in fact it was a local multiplayer, that everyone was familiar with and could easily understand and it was also affordable (in bundle with the console). Now firstly the WiiU's market offering can't be easily determined (and that is probably its main problem) but it's clearly different form the Wii. Since the gamepad is its main innovation it's hard to say the console is designed for local multiplayer (you can only use one). Is it affordable? no, it still costs more than Wii on day one. Is it for everyone? Hardly since the main goal of the gamepad is to add depht and that is not an easy concept to understand. New Super Mario Bros U which is exactly the same game as its predecessor, it perfectly includes the values of Wii but completely uncoherent to what the WiiU was offering. Of course a user that bought the WiiU on day one was expecting a game to utilize the controller in a meaningfull way and was also expecting a graphical improvement, since he had paid more for the better hardware. So this explains why NSMBU underperformed. You could do the same "exercise" with Metroid Prime to tell why the 1st entry in the series sold more on 20m userbase than the 3rd entry on a 5 five times larger one. A game like UC/TLoU would push more units only if Nintendo designed a console aimed the same target and with the same features as Ps4/XB One but at the same time, a console like that would weaken the potential of many core IPs like Mario, Mario Kart, Pokemon, etc. |
That's the thing though, the audience who buy games like Uncharted are the majority now, hence why PS4 is doing so well by catering primarily to this demographic.
The market for a console geared primarily for the likes of Mario is shrinking, hence Wii U's poor sales.
