Nintendo basically says, "There is no mafia."

[greenmedic88]

There's nothing wrong with being a casual gamer. I don't know why that's seen as such a dirty word to the core gamers.

Well, actually it's more or less the same reason why hardcore PC gamers, who spend enough money to buy a decent used car on building the "ultimate" gaming rig deride console gamers, core or not.

There's more of a backlash these days because console gaming has continued to grow, while the PC exclusive market has continued to contract, leading more formerly PC exclusive developers to push console games.

Even though there will never be a console that matches the best PC one could build, the gap between gaming rig and the PS3/360 has diminished to the point where only dedicated PC gamers and tech spec obsessive compulsives care about the differences.

On the console side of the house, we see that the casual market is the hottest growth segment, while the core market appears to be shrinking in Japan, growing slowly in the US, and growing moderately in the EU (gaming in general has more room for growth there).

So the downside for console gamers is that more softs not specifically targeted for the core audience are being developed and published to the point that some high profile games (that are newsworthy to non-gaming press) are now being targeted at a different demographic as well.

Naturally, some core gamers are going to take releases like Wii Fit to be the harbinger of doom for the core gaming market. But that's about as likely to be true as the "GTAIV will kill the Wii market" belief (in effect saying the release of a sure selling core audience game is going to have any effect on the casual market).

The only problem with relying upon this new demographic is that it depends largely upon volume of new consumers, rather than a golden core demographic that buys several times more games per year. Do the new consumers continue to expand into core gamer genres, or are they perfectly content with flash games, solitaire, Wii Sports and possibly Wii Fit? Most new gamers will fall into the latter category.