zorg1000 said:
Nuvendil said:
If you think the Wii becoming 100% synonymous with motion controlled party-orriented games with little substance that were consistently marketed towards a market outside the primary demographics that made up the dedicated gaming device market in gens 1 to 6 and now makes up the market in gen 8 had no impact on the Wii brand then...well I have no idea what to even say to that.
Nearly every average consumer of dedicated gaming devices lambasts the Wii for being tainted by "casual" motion controlled games like Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Wii Play, etc etc. Because while other games sold well, Wii Sports was literally the most ubiquitous game a console has ever had with an attach rate of over EIGHTY PERCENT. You cannot use the opinions of a site like this that is populated by a small subset that is waist deep in sales speculation and follows every release and piece of news constantly as the basis for what the average Joe thinks. I mean shoot, I have seen people who are serious gamers who don't even REMEMBER that Twilight Princess was a launch title, who only think it was Wii Sports and the casual motion craze that pushed the Wii for the first 12 months and even further. The constant bashing of the Wii motion controls as purely a gimmick. And yes, a lot of the blame for this does fall on Wii Sports because it was literally everywhere: on every box, in tons of marketing, in every house that had a Wii. Now as I said, the Wii's reputation stayed afloat for a long while and there are obvious reasons for that: the technology was new and therefore cool for a time, the thing was marketed obsessively for a time, and of course the sheer success of it was somewhat self-perpetuating as it made it must have in many people's eyes. But in the longrun, the Wii brand was completely gutted by the time the Wii U came back, with no respect left to it. Wii Sports and the other Wii games were fantastic sellers for the Wii and did a lot in the 7th gen, but by allowing those to dominate to near exclusion of all other games the image of the Wii, the Wii became *entirely* about that in many people's minds to the exclusion of almost all else.
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You are mistaking average joe for "hardcore gamers". Average Joe had alot of fun playing Wii Sports and overall look back at it fondly while the "hardcore gamer" thought it was trash because it didnt fit their definition of what a "real" game is.
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And I think that this is a very incorrect perception. The hardcore minority is actually where you will find those who actually have a balanced view of the Wii cause they actually follow trailers and news. The shallow, "that's not a game", judge by the cover, "I don't want gimmicks!" mindset is, imho, the dominant one. Motion controls are decidedly disliked, Wii Sports was the most ubiquitous game on the Wii, Wii Sports is all motion controls, therefore Wii=gimmicky console. It's not that Wii Sports was entirley crap. It was vapid and a lot of people have a pretty dang low opinion of it despite their fun times with it, but it was good for being a pack in title. But it made the Wii a single-note devide in terms of reputation: it WAS motion controls. And thus the Wii brand was entirely tied to the frankly doomed reputation of said controls. That's my whole point, the Wii was tied by Wii Sports to the ship of motion controls and had no hope of getting off and when they sunk, it went with it.
The average consumer of dedicated gaming devices NOW is not the one from the seventh gen, a gen swelled to ridiculous numbers by neighboring markets dabbling temporarily in the industry. We are essentially back to the sixth gen makeup, an audience very much entrenched in traditional gaming. That's your average consumer that actually cares about dedicated gaming devices at this point. And that's the audience that has very low opinions of the Wii. And yes that is largely tied to the motion controls that absolutely dominate people's memory of the system. And yes, that dominance is largely due to Wii Sports and co.
