Who exactly was Nintendo's primary target audience with the Wii U?

[Mummelmann]

freebs2 said:

Mummelmann said:

They aimed for everyone and ended up missing everyone instead. Marketing, game droughts and other factors were never the real issue; the product itself was just highly flawed at its core and I always said it was down to a lack of basic appeal. Here's what I had to say on the matter roughly 4-5 months before it released, I don't think anyone can argue with this post in hindsight:

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=4619667

You lose me a bit on the 'Wii's serial flopping "hardcore" 3rd party titles' argument. Besides that I completely agree you were right.

One of the greatest, if not the main, flaw of WiiU's concpetion is that they haven't designed the console with a specific target in mind. As you said, they just tried to please everyone basing on their previous console of choice. They tried to get the Wii audience offering party games, NSMBU, Mario Kart and the likes and they tired to lure into the Ps360 fanbase with the 3rd party ports the Wii missed.

When you look for a target audience, the most common thing to do is to segment the market basing on customer's defining traits like demographic varaibles, behaviours, expected benefits, etc etc. They clearly haven't done that. If they had reflected on expected benefits it would have been clear that Ps3/360 were looking for cutting-edge hardware on a new console, also that former Wii owners were looking for very accessible and affordable games and more social interaction. The WiiU short-lived both of those expectations.

I think this is why a certain someone kept arguing in the UNITY thread that there was no such thing as demographics, that it was just a made-up term. If one admits that demographics exist, one also inevitably sees the problem with the Wii U and its clear lack of aim at any one segment.